February 2022 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Quei robocani che si chiamano "lodicevoio..."
by M. Fioretti Nov. 7, 2023

Nov. 7, 2023

Sviluppi robotici assolutamente ovvi, forse il solo problema e' non averne parlato abbastanza allora: https://stop.zona-m.net/2022/02/police-robodogs-are-all-called-toldya/ Marco -- Help me write my NEXT MILLION WORDS for digital awareness: https://stop.zona-m.net/2021/10/funding-2021-2022/

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Re: [nexa] IBM Watson: an interesting lesson learned in AI/ML in medicine
by Giuseppe Attardi March 20, 2022

March 20, 2022

Ci sono alcune spiegazioni a questo esito. Prima di tutto Watson era basato su tecnologie di 20 anni fa, ormai obsolete con l’avvento del Deep Learning, e dei Transformer Model allenati su enormi collezioni di testi non annotati. Poi i modelli attuali di ML sono efficaci solo su task molto specifici. Credo Watson non fosse in grado di mettere insieme conoscenze da diverse fonti: i successi sbandierati riguardavano casi molto rari di malattie che riusciva a individuare sulla base di una ricerca sui testi di letteratura medica. Oggi si stanno svilupoando sistemi basati su transformers in grado di svolgere contemporaneamente più task, analizzando insieme testi, immagini AWHY in modalità end-to-end. Questo però richiede corpora di allenamento misti e ben annotati, ciò che chiamo Human-in-the-loop e che distingue l’AI dalla semplice statistica, che ancora non sono facili da trovare, specialmente nel settore medico, a causa di questioni di privacy. Insomma occorre trasferire le competenze umane attraverso l’apprendimento dal comportamento degli esperti umani, che si basano su segnali diversi e svariati. IBM aveva tentato di accaparrarsi tali dati con un accordo molto criticato col NHS britannico. In Iitalia aveva tentato la stessa operazione con lo Human Technopole. Mi risulta che la ASL di Bolzano abbia acquistato una versione di Watson, salvo poi accorgersi che Watson era allenato solo su testi inglesi. In definitiva, le potenzialità per l’AI nel campo medico sono enormi, e stanno già producendo significativi progressi in campi come la selezione di molecole, la sintesi di farmaci, ecc. , mentre le applicazioni alla diagnosi sono più lontane. — Beppe > On 31 Jan 2022, at 12:00, nexa-request(a)server-nexa.polito.it wrote: > > From: Enrico Nardelli <nardelli(a)mat.uniroma2.it> > To: Nexa <nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it> > Subject: [nexa] IBM Watson: an interesting lesson learned in AI/ML in > medicine > Message-ID: <b0ea1988-c601-2834-2b5a-67b462940a70(a)mat.uniroma2.it> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed > > > It started in Jeopardy and ended in loss. IBM's flagship AI Watson Health has been sold to venture capitalists for an undisclosed sum thought to be around a billion dollars, or a quarter of what the division cost IBM in acquisitions alone since it was spun off in 2015. > > ... > > When clinical trials were published, Watson came up short every time. It didn't matter what field it was in, it consistently scored less well than human clinicians – sometimes under 50 per cent – and demonstrated some alarming blind spots in suggested treatments. Medical professionals had enough to worry about without babysitting a broken AI: it got dropped. > > ... > > IBM's Watson Health failed at the time, like so much AL/ML, because it didn't know what the question was – ironic, since the game of Jeopardy at which it excelled is all about deducing questions from data. It wanted to automate the highest skilled aspects of healthcare, diagnosis and treatment, but the problem wasn't one of getting the most data and the best algorithm. Rather, the problem was one of meaning. > > ... > > Fortunately, this sad case does not mean AI-based tools can't work in medicine, nor even that Watson Health won't do so, nor that AIs' evaluation and adoption has been slowed down. Ask the right questions, such as "why do some patients get readmitted" and can you spot them early?, and you get the right answers. AI in healthcare is being adopted, and it shows every sign of deserving its place. > > ... > > https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/31/machine_learning_the_hard_way/ > > > -- EN

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Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute
by Giovanni De Gregorio Feb. 28, 2022

Feb. 28, 2022

Dear all, this is to share with you that we have recently open the call for applications for the Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute which will be held at Jesus College, Oxford on 1-12 August 2022 http://pcmlp.socleg.ox.ac.uk/oxford-media-policy-summer-institute-2022/ After a two-year break due to covid, we are looking forward to welcome participants and speakers back in Oxford the first two weeks of August. Join us to discuss contemporary issues of global media policy over breakfast, during seminars and on long walks through the Oxford countryside! The course for 2022 will focus on Technology and Policy During Times of Crisis. We will examine key issues in media law and policy- topics may include AI and online content moderation of extreme speech; internet shutdowns during elections and conflict; public diplomacy in a time of mis/disinformation; big data and humanitarian interventions; social media and migration; and innovation in the global south. With the participation of speakers from around the world, we will be exploring media policy in current events such as the escalating crisis in Ukraine, media development under the Taliban in Afghanistan, and online hate speech and conflict in Ethiopia. We will also use our vantage point from the UK to discuss emerging issues in the EU and engage with local actors including Ofcom and the BBC. As with institutes in the past, we will have speakers from across Oxford as well as prominent guests from policy and government, and the private sector. In case you are interested, just feel free to let me know. Best wishes Giovanni De Gregorio

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149° Mercoledì di Nexa | 9 Marzo 2022 | Modalità Telematica
by Nexa Media Feb. 28, 2022

Feb. 28, 2022

Gentilissimi, vi segnaliamo che il 149° Mercoledì di Nexa, /*"Il dovere alla salute. Sul rischio di sottoutilizzo dell''intelligenza artificiale in ambito sanitario"*/, con ospite *Ugo Pagallo* (Trustee Centro Nexa, Università degli Studi di Torino), si svolgerà *mercoledì 9 marzo, dalle ore 18.00 alle ore 20.00*, in modalità telematica, utilizzando la piattaforma di videoconferenza BigBlueButton. Il Prof. Pagallo presenterà il suo nuovo libro Il dovere alla salute. Sul rischio di sottoutilizzo dell''intelligenza artificiale in ambito sanitario <https://www.mimesisedizioni.it/libro/9788857586670>, Mimesis, Milano, 2022, primo volume della collana Tecnologie emergenti e diritto (Mimesis, Milano), diretta da Eleonora Bassi e Ugo Pagallo. Sarà possibile partecipare al seminario connettendosi al seguente indirizzo: https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent Nexa Center for Internet and Society Newsletter Se non visualizzi correttamente questo messaggio clicca qui <https://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-149> NEXA 149° Mercoledì di Nexa Mercoledì 9 marzo 2022, ore 18.00 - 20.00 Politecnico di Torino https://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-149 Il dovere alla salute. Sul rischio di sottoutilizzo dell’intelligenza artificiale in ambito sanitario (Presentazione del primo volume della collana /Tecnologie emergenti e diritto/, Mimesis, Milano, diretta da Eleonora Bassi e Ugo Pagallo) Speaker Prof. Ugo Pagallo (Trustee Centro Nexa, Università di Torino) This event will be webcast live: https://nexa.polito.it/nexa-hangout-on-air L'INCONTRO SI SVOLGERÀ IN MODALITÀ TELEMATICA UTILIZZANDO IL SOFTWARE DI CONFERENCE CALL *BIGBLUEBUTTON*. Per partecipare all'incontro: https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent Il problema del *sottoutilizzo dell’intelligenza artificiale* è a tutt’oggi un tema poco esplorato. L’analisi proposta mira a esporre le ragioni del *sottoutilizzo in ambito sanitario*, che rinviano a dilemmi etici e interessi economici, istanze sociali e standard tecnici, valutando altresì le iniziative dei legislatori e delle autorità pubbliche che hanno inteso fronteggiare il fenomeno. La stima è che i *costi opportunità legati al sottoutilizzo tecnologico in ambito sanitario* possano incidere in paesi come l’Italia fino al 2% del prodotto interno lordo. Visti i limiti fin qui incontrati da legislatori e autorità, l’obiettivo è di mettere a frutto anni di ricerca e collaborazione scientifica con alcune organizzazioni internazionali, dalla *Commissione Europea* all’*Organizzazione Mondiale della Sanità*, formulando un piano d’azione e un metodo con cui sfruttare tutte le potenzialità della tecnologia, a beneficio dell’umanità. “Il dovere alla salute di cui parlerò in queste pagine non va pertanto riferito soltanto agli eventuali obblighi, che pur esistono, degli individui nei confronti di se stessi e degli altri. In realtà, il dovere alla salute va soprattutto analizzato in rapporto alla responsabilità che le autorità hanno nell’affrontare le questioni di salute, in particolare per quanto riguarda casi di sottoutilizzo tecnologico.” Ugo Pagallo su /Il dovere alla salute. Sul rischio di sottoutilizzo dell’intelligenza artificiale in ambito sanitario./ BIOGRAFIA - e informazioni supplementari [mercoledì149] *Ugo PAGALLO* è professore ordinario di Filosofia del diritto e Informatica giuridica presso il Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza dell’Università di Torino. Da anni collabora con istituzioni e organismi internazionali, tra cui la Commissione europea e l’Organizzazione mondiale della sanità, sui temi dell’innovazione tecnologica e le sfide del digitale. Autore di tredici monografie e numerosi contributi in prestigiose riviste internazionali, i suoi lavori rappresentano un punto di riferimento per l’odierno dibattito su diritto, intelligenza artificiale e tecnologie emergenti. Il suo libro /The Laws of Robots/ (2013) è stato tradotto in cinese e giapponese. *Letture consigliate e link utili:* * Pagallo, Ugo (2022) /Il dovere alla salute. Sul rischio di sottoutilizzo dell’intelligenza artificiale in ambito sanitario/ <https://www.mimesisedizioni.it/libro/9788857586670>, Mimesis, Milano * Pagallo, Ugo and Durante, Massimo /The good, the bad, and the invisible with its opportunity costs/ <https://www.mdpi.com/2571-8800/5/1/11>, in ‘J’, 2022, 5(2) * Pagallo, Ugo (2021) /The governance of AI and its legal context-dependency/ <https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-80083-3>, in J. Cowls and J. Morley (eds.). The 2020 Yearbook of the Digital Ethics Lab, pp. 57-68, Springer * O'Sullivan, Shane, Nevejans, Nathalie, Allen, Colin, Blyth, Andrew, Leonard, Simon, Pagallo, Ugo, Holzinger, Katharina, Holzinger, Andreas, Imran Sajid, Mohammed and Hutan Ashrafian (2019), /Legal, regulatory, and ethical frameworks for development of standards in artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous robotic surgery/ <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/rcs.1968>, The International Journal of Medical Robotics and Computer Assisted Surgery, 15(1): e1968 * Floridi, Luciano, Cowls, John, Beltrametti, Monica, Chatila, Raja, Chazerand, Patrice, Dignum, Virginia, Luetge, Christoph, Madelin, Robert, Pagallo, Ugo, Rossi, Francesca, Schafer Burkhard, Valcke, Peggy, Vayena, Effy (2018), /AI4People—An Ethical Framework for a Good AI Society: Opportunities, Risks, Principles, and Recommendations/ <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-018-9482-5>, Minds and Machines, 28(4): 689-707 Che cosa sono il Centro Nexa e i cicli di incontri “Mercoledì di Nexa” e “Nexa Lunch Seminar” <https://www.facebook.com/nexa.center/> <https://twitter.com/nexacenter> <https://www.youtube.com/user/NexaCenter> <https://www.instagram.com/nexa_center/> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/3054864/admin/> #MimesisEdizioni <https://twitter.com/MimesisEdizioni> #UNITO <https://twitter.com/unito> #nexawednesday <https://twitter.com/search?q=%23nexawednesday&src=typd> Il Centro Nexa su Internet & Società del Politecnico di Torino (Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica) dal 2006 è un centro di ricerca indipendente e interdisciplinare che, in collaborazione con l'Università di Torino, studia Internet (e più in generale le Tecnologie digitali) e i suoi rapporti con la società. Maggiori informazioni all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/about. Durante i “*Mercoledì di Nexa*”, che si tengono *ogni 2° mercoledì del mese* alle *ore 18 in punto*, il Centro Nexa su Internet e Società apre le sue porte non solo agli esperti e a tutti coloro i quali lavorano con Internet, ma anche a semplici appassionati e cittadini. Il ciclo di incontri intende approfondire, con un linguaggio preciso ma accessibile, i temi legati alla Rete: motori di ricerca, Creative Commons, social networks, open source/software libero, neutralità della rete, libertà di espressione, privacy, file sharing, big e open data, smart cities e molto altro. Al centro di quasi tutti gli incontri un ospite pronto a dialogare con i direttori del Centro Nexa, il Prof. Juan Carlos De Martin del Politecnico di Torino e il Prof. Marco Ricolfi dell'Università di Torino, nonché lo staff e i Fellows del Centro Nexa. Maggiori informazioni sui Mercoledì di Nexa, incluso un elenco di tutti i “Mercoledì” passati, sono disponibili all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi. Si segnala inoltre che dal maggio 2012 *ogni 4° mercoledì* del mese *dalle ore 13 alle ore 14* il Centro Nexa organizza anche i "*Nexa Lunch Seminar*". Una lista di tutti i “Lunch Seminar” passati è disponibile all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/lunch-seminars. See our events calendar <http://nexa.polito.it/events> if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions, lectures, and conferences not listed in this email. Our events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted. Responsabile Comunicazione Centro Nexa su Internet & Società: *Anita Botta*, tel: +39 011 090 7219, Mob: +39 347 131 3903, anita.botta(a)polito.it. Maggiori informazioni sui Mercoledì di Nexa e i Nexa Lunch Seminar, sono disponibili all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/events. Weekly Events Newsletter. Sign up <http://nexa.polito.it/mailing-lists> to receive this newsletter if this email was forwarded to you. To manage your subscription preferences, please click here <https://server-nexa.polito.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nexa>. Connect & get involved: Jobs, internships, and more <http://nexa.polito.it/get-involved>. Cordiali saluti, -- Anita Botta Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino – DAUIN Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24 - 10129 Torino web: https://nexa.polito.it/ mail: anita.botta(a)polito.it tel: 011 090 7219

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Carbon footprint of ML
by Giuseppe Attardi Feb. 28, 2022

Feb. 28, 2022

Trasmetto per conoscenza (ambasciator non porta pene) la risposta di Google alle critiche sui costi energetici del ML: https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/02/good-news-about-carbon-footprint-of.html <https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/02/good-news-about-carbon-footprint-of.html> — Beppe

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presa di posizione in EADH di DH scholars russi
by maurizio lana Feb. 27, 2022

Feb. 27, 2022

segnalo questa open letter di studiose e studiosi di DH russi, inviata a EADH (European Association of Digital Humanities): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfFf_xQdYjLvYac3es1qYaRPAF8XDtvEZP… loro, come i firmatari dell'appello di cui parla Science, si espongono a rischi e pericoli inimmaginabili per noi che viviamo nelle nostre "tiepide case". forse quanto al "fare", non possiamo fare nulla per loro; ma possiamo chiederci se averemo lo stesso coraggio (o prepararci ad averlo) quando toccherà noi prendere posizione. Maurizio Il 27/02/22 12:00, "Diego.Latella" <diego.latella(a)isti.cnr.it> ha scritto: > Segnalo questa presa di posizione su Science di scienziati russi. > https://www.science.org/content/article/step-nowhere-russian-scientist-orga… ------------------------------------------------------------------------ |mural of Giulio Regeni in Mohammed Mahmoud Street, Cairo the source is https://alwafd.news/images/thumbs/752/new/027f918bb62bf148193d5920ca67ded7.… the meaning of the place https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-20395260| ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Maurizio Lana Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici Università del Piemonte Orientale piazza Roma 36 - 13100 Vercelli tel. +39 347 7370925

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NYT, "Does Anyone Know What Paper Towels Should Cost?"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Feb. 27, 2022

Feb. 27, 2022

*Does Anyone Know What Paper Towels Should Cost?** * /Online shopping was supposed to give consumers more power and freedom. Instead, costs are so fluid that household goods fluctuate almost like Bitcoin./ By Daisuke Wakabayashi Feb. 26, 2022 When a holiday toy catalog from Amazon arrived in the mail in late October, Krista Hoffmann noticed something amiss. In 100 pages of Lego sets, princess castles, action figures and the impossible-to-find Sony PlayStation 5, the catalog presented just about everything — except the prices. “At first, I thought I wasn’t looking close enough, so I flipped through a few more pages,” said Ms. Hoffmann, a stay-at-home mother of three children in Colorado Springs. “Then I realized, ‘Oh, this is intentional.’ Why would you not put the prices there?” The absence of prices was not an oversight; it was the natural evolution of two decades of online shopping. In the early days of the internet, there was breathless excitement that e-commerce would lead to greater price transparency, allowing shoppers to know exactly where to find the best deals. This was supposed to be good for consumers and bad for retailers forced to compete with one another in a profitability-killing race to the lowest prices. Instead another reality has emerged: Shoppers are losing sight of what things cost. […] Continua qui: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/26/technology/amazon-price-swings-shopping.…

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Future of online advertising: Adtech’s new clothes might redefine privacy more than they reform profiling
by Giuseppe Attardi Feb. 26, 2022

Feb. 26, 2022

Il pericolo viene da dove non te saresti aspettato: un accordo Mozilla-Meta. La questione dei dat personali è secondaria, il vero problema sono le pratiche dei servizi gratuiti basati su ad-tech. Civil society, regulators, and legislators must stop thinking in terms of mountains of data, where power comes from the ability to accumulate it, and is diminished by letting others have copies of it or reducing its collection. The smart money is on the power firms can gain through controlling code and computation, even when data never leaves a device in an identifiable way. The harms of hoarding data are real, but also old news. Now, the focus needs to move to legal limits to the practices and outcomes from personalisation, profiling, and controlling attention, not just limits to the data shared in the process. https://netzpolitik.org/2022/future-of-online-advertising-adtechs-new-cloth…

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presa di posizione su Science di scienziati russi
by Diego.Latella Feb. 26, 2022

Feb. 26, 2022

Buongiorno. Segnalo questa presa di posizione su Science di scienziati russi. https://www.science.org/content/article/step-nowhere-russian-scientist-orga… DL -- Dott. Diego Latella - Senior Researcher CNR/ISTI, Via Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy (http:www.isti.cnr.it [1]) FM&&T Lab. (http://fmt.isti.cnr.it) CNR/GI-STS (http://gists.pi.cnr.it) https://www.isti.cnr.it/People/D.Latella - ph: +390506212982, fax: +390506212040 =================== The quest for a war-free world has a basic purpose: survival. But if in the process we learn how to achieve it by love rather than by fear, by kindness rather than compulsion; if in the process we learn how to combine the essential with the enjoyable, the expedient with the benevolent, the practical with the beautiful, this will be an extra incentive to embark on this great task. Above all, remember your humanity. -- Sir Joseph Rotblat Links: ------ [1] http://www.isti.cnr.it

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I’ve been waiting 15 years for Facebook to die. I’m more hopeful than ever | Cory Doctorow | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Feb. 25, 2022

Feb. 25, 2022

<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/24/ive-been-waiting-15-y…> I’ve been praying for Facebook’s collapse ever since it attained liftoff. In a 2007 article, I predicted that “your creepy ex-co-workers will kill Facebook” by demanding to know why you won’t “friend” them, prompting an exodus to the next platform. That was the social network cycle back then: a new network opens, and you and the people you genuinely like enjoy a rollicking group chat until all the people you have to pretend to like show up. That’s the double-edged sword of products that rely on “network effects” – the economists’ term for a product that gets better when more people use it. Sure, you might join Facebook because your friends are all there (and more people might sign up because you’re there), but that also means that every time your friends leave Facebook, it’s a reason for you to leave, too. My prediction failed. For a decade and a half, Facebook resisted the fate of all the social networks that preceded it. In hindsight, it’s easy to see why: it cheated. The company used investor cash to buy and neutralize competitors (“Kids are leaving Facebook for Insta? Fine, we’ll buy Insta. We know you value choice!”). It allegedly spied on users through the deceptive use of apps such as Onavo and exploited the intelligence to defeat rivals. More than anything, it ratcheted up “switching costs.” “Switching costs” is another economic term: it means “the price you pay when you switch from one service to another.” Switching from Facebook to a rival means saying goodbye to the communities, friends and customers you hang out with on the platform. Normally, tech has really low switching costs: want to change from T-Mobile to Verizon? Just port your number. Your friends don’t even have to know you did; they can still call you and you them. Tech’s rock-bottom switching costs are what kept the industry so dynamic in its early days. Microsoft could deploy an army of corporate salespeople to turn Microsoft Office into an industry standard, then Apple could come along and reverse-engineer the Office formats and make the interoperable iWork office suite. That means that Windows users could switch to the Mac and open their Word docs in Pages, their Excel spreadsheets in Numbers and their PowerPoints in Keynote. It’s different for Facebook. The company’s ascendancy coincided with an overall concentration in the tech sector, and, with it, laws that protected winners of the latest round of the interoperability wars from new challengers. Apple was able to reverse-engineer its way out of the Microsoft Office trap, but woe betide a company that tries the same trick on Apple – try to make a program that lets you run iPhone apps on an Android device, or read the media files you buy in Apple’s book, movie or music stores, and you will quickly discover that the law is now on the sides of the giants, not the upstarts. That same legal shift is how Facebook has kept its switching costs high. Fifteen years ago, it was safe to make a Facebook-MySpace bridge that would let you leave MySpace but stay in touch with your friends there by scraping your MySpace inbox and moving the waiting messages to your Facebook inbox. Try to build one of those bridges today – blasting an escape tunnel through Facebook’s walled garden – and Facebook will sue you until the rubble bounces. But high switching costs have their limits. If you make your service terrible enough, a certain number of users will find the cost of switching preferable to the pain of staying. And as users leave, network effects start to work in reverse: though every user that joins makes your service more valuable, every user that leaves makes the service less valuable. If you’re only on Facebook to stay in touch with a small group of friends, each one of those friends who departs makes it easier for you to make the jump, too. And once you go, it’s even easier for the rest of the group to bail. This is very bad news for Facebook. After years of slowing US growth, Facebook just experienced its first-ever US shrinkage, which precipitated a $230bn stock crash, the largest in global corporate history. Though most of Facebook’s users are global, its US users generate far more profit than users in the rest of the world. Losing a US user is expensive. Even more important: the US is Facebook’s home base, and its US user base is its main bargaining chip in resisting US regulation, and in securing US support in its regulatory battles abroad. Speaking of regulatory battles abroad: Facebook is on the brink of having its business model declared illegal under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Fending off that scenario will depend on vast capital expenditures and friendly European regulators, and Facebook’s running short on both. Oh, and Europeans are Facebook’s second most valuable users. Admittedly, when a company’s shares decline, it’s not like the company itself has lost any money – those losses hit shareholders, not the business itself. However, Facebook’s costs and share-price are intimately bound together, thanks to tech firms’ reliance on stock grants as a way of scoring a discount on their wage-bills. Engineers, lawyers, and other high-paid, in-demand professionals are glad to take much of their compensation in stock, betting that the company’s share price will balloon and that they can cash out their shares and keep their winnings, thanks to the tax-preferred status of capital gains – in most of the world, the wages you earn for doing useful work are taxed at a much higher rate than the winnings you get from lucky bets on stocks. Even before its stock fell off a cliff, Facebook was mired in a multi-year hiring crisis. Nobody wanted to work for Facebook because it’s a terrible company that makes terrible products that everyone hates and only use because the company has rigged the system to punish users for switching. Facebook was already paying a wage premium, offering sweeteners to in-demand workers in exchange for checking their consciences at the door. Those sweeteners mostly took the form of shares, which means that all those morally flexible “Metamates” got a hefty pay-cut when the company’s stock price fell off a cliff. Expect a lot of them to leave – and expect the company to have to pay even more to replace them. Companies with falling share prices can’t use share grants to attract workers. Facebook is now famously trying to pivot (ugh) to virtual reality to save itself. It’s an expensive gambit. It’s going to alienate a lot of its users. It’s going to alienate a lot of its in-demand workers. It’s going to freak out a lot of regulators. Meanwhile, the switching costs for people who want to jump ship keep getting lower. It’s not merely that fewer and fewer of the people you want to talk with are still on Facebook. Even if there’s someone whose virtual company you can’t bear to part with, lawmakers in the US and Europe are working on legislation that would force Facebook to allow third parties to “federate” new services with it. That would mean that you could quit Facebook and join an upstart rival – say, one by a privacy-respecting nonprofit or even a user-owned co-op – and still exchange messages with the communities, customers and family you left behind on Facebook’s sinking ship. For 15 years, I’ve been waiting for Facebook to suffer the fate of every network-effects-driven success story – to experience the precipitous decline that is triggered by people leaving the service and taking the value they brought to it with them. Facebook now has to somehow retain users who are fed up to the eyeballs with its never-ending failures and scandals, while funding a pivot to VR, while fending off overlapping salvoes of global regulatory challenges to its business model, while paying a massive wage premium to attract and retain the workers that it needs to make any of this happen. All that, amid an exodus of its most valuable users and a frontal regulatory assault on its ability to extract revenues from those users’ online activities. Stein’s Law holds that “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Facebook can’t go on forever. Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, including the forthcoming book Chokepoint Capitalism, with Rebecca Giblin, about monopoly and fairness in the creative arts labor market. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame

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