In Search of the Human Face of Artificial Intelligence

by Bill Maurer and Daivi Rodima-Taylor in Backchannels, Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)

“Once bots gained human rights, a wave of legislation swept through many governments and economic coalitions that later became known as the Human Rights Indenture Laws. They established the rights of indentured robots, and, after a decade of court battles, established the rights of humans to become indentured, too. After all, if human-equivalent beings could be indentured, why not humans themselves?” – Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

Figure 1. At the Symposium. Credits: Daivi Rodima-Taylor

We recognize the grim logic governing unfree labor in Annalee Newitz’s 2017 novel about future forms of property. Contemporary forms of human slavery and indenture occupy the same world as new intelligent computational systems and human-computational assemblages that are shifting the nature of work and contract—see, for instance, ride hailing, which is only a prelude to broader changes in augmented labor relations. This conjuncture brings to the fore urgent questions of autonomy, infrastructure, and ethics.

The symposium “The Human Face of Artificial Intelligence: Infrastructures, Narratives, Ethics” that took place at the University of California, Irvine on October 17, 2019, brought together an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars to discuss new challenges and opportunities around the systems of AI. Broadly defined as intelligent automated systems that can analyze their environment, make decisions and adapt their behavior by learning from experience, systems of AI steadily permeate social and political spaces, fomenting novel conversations about law, ethics, governance, sociality, and humanity.

If a complex AI system malfunctions and causes harm to humans, who or what should be found liable and according to which criteria? Should AI be viewed as a mere technological tool, or an autonomous agent with a free will? How does artificial intelligence reshape our conversations about legal personhood and human spirituality within this increasingly complex intersection of humanity and technology? Exploring the conceptualizations of a legal person in the history of Anglo-American jurisprudence, Summer Kim of UCI Law School discussed the challenges around prescribing new rights and obligations to artificially intelligent autonomous agents. Reflecting on lessons from arguments that corporations have used to enjoy some of the rights that natural persons have, she examined the ways how corporate law could guide the responsible use of technology in society.

Read the full post on Backchannels, Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) here: https://www.4sonline.org/blog/post/in_search_of_the_human_face_of_artificial_intelligence

Loy Loy: The Financial Education Board Game for Everyone

By Mrinalini Tankha, Portland State University on the Consortium of Practicing and Applied Anthropologists

Ethnocharettes, role-playing, simulation games, and other embodied pedagogical strategies are receiving increased attention in the field of anthropology. They are also increasingly being used to teach the basic principles of money and finance. These experiential teaching tools provide learners an opportunity to “switch sides” and take on the role of people facing financial hardships. This creates empathy and a more nuanced and critical understandings of socio-economic problems.

Loy Loy: The Savings Board Game

Loy Loy (“Money Money” in Khmer) is a financial education board game developed by a team of anthropologists and economists at the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) at the University of California, Irvine, the Department of Banking and Finance at Monash University, and the Department of Anthropology at Portland State University. Loy Loy is a role-playing game where players take on the roles of Cambodian women workers in a Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA), earning monthly wages while making monthly contributions to their local savings group. Each month a different player gets a turn to take the pot of savings collected by the ROSCA. As players go through the game, they are hit with unforeseen expenses, but also collect windfalls and have a chance to invest in assets. Intended as an antidote to monopoly, the end goal of the game is for players to collectively save enough money to purchase a garment factory together. The game forces players to cooperate and support one another; everyone loses if any one player goes bankrupt!

Expense and Asset Cards

Loy Loy provides a window into the complexity of financial decision making for people living on the edge of poverty. It educates players about alternative and collective forms of finance where community relationships act as safety nets and provide more immediate ways of confronting economic hardship. In a creative and fun environment, the game demonstrates the ways money and financial instruments are socially and culturally embedded in value systems, mutual obligations and negotiations of morality, while also teaching basic savings and money managing skills and financial literacy concepts such as risk management, income smoothing through credit, value return on investment, and liquidity.


Loy Loy is intended for a broad audience, from high school and university students to financial literacy advocates, educators, and policymakers in non-profits, banks, businesses, and government engaged in financial education programs. Loy Loy is therefore not only an innovative active learning tool for anthropology students but also an example of anthropology in action that breaks out of the ivory tower to educate a wider public engaged in poverty alleviation and financial inclusion.

Pilot testing Loy Loy at my Cultures of Money & Finance course at Portland State University

Loy Loy is currently in the pilot-testing phase of product development. It has already been tested at several universities, international development conferences, credit unions, community organizations, NGOs and foundations. It was also recently on view at the British Museum as part of an exhibition titled Playing with Money: Currency and Games.

Members of The Cambodian Family Community Center in Orange County playtesting Loy Loy

Please buy the game and join us in playtesting Loy Loy! We would also love to receive your feedback. This contributes to the iterative design process and will enhance the experience and playability of the game.

To purchase the game: https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/loy-loy-the-savings-game

 Loy Loy website: http://loyloy.org

For more information, contact: Mrinalini Tankha mtankha@pdx.edu or imtfi@uci.edu.

Read more about Loy Loy at the Geek Anthropologist, Analog Game Studies, LA Times, Medium, and IMTFI.

View original post here: https://www.copaainfo.org/post/loy-loy-the-financial-education-board-game-for-everyone

***

JOIN US! Next Friday, November 22nd

12-4pm at the AAAs in Vancouver

For those attending the American Anthropological Association (AAA) conference 
Loy Loy has an installation on

11/22/2019 from 12:00 PM to 4:00 PM 
CC EAST | Exhibition Hall A  | East Convention Level

Come by the table, check out Loy Loy, and 

get stamped with IMTFI's very own 3-D Harriet Tubman stamp from Dano Wall!

***

Mediating microinsurance: the techniques of translation

Article in the Journal of Cultural Economy by Christopher Paek, The American Institutes for Research

Abstract

Over the past decade, microinsurance has taken off in South Africa. The strength of this market is fuelled almost exclusively by funeral insurance, unsurprising considering the immense cultural value South Africans place on funerals. Moreover, insurance companies have achieved scale by working through brokers who are embedded within community-based institutions like burial societies and funeral parlours. The incursion of ‘insurance culture’ into this sphere has thus resulted in an ecosystem in which formal and informal institutions are in fluid states of tension and cooperation. Mediators sustain this ecosystem and enable the extension of microinsurance into low-income communities. I employ Bruno Latour’s notion of ‘translation’ in my analysis of three types of mediators: insurance agents, funeral parlour operators, and burial society administrators. The paper, which is based on fieldwork I conducted in Cape Town, South Africa, focuses on these actors’ specific techniques of translation, i.e. the different strategies/practices used to reconcile the disparate rationalities and institutions of the formal insurance system with those of the informal risk management sphere. An analysis attuned to the various social identities and positions embodied by these brokers reveals the dislocations, ambiguities, conflicts, and opportunities generated by the expansion of microinsurance markets into the low-income terrain.

Access Journal of Cultural Economy: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2019.1639528

Access through ResearchGate: 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335637013_Mediating_microinsurance_the_techniques_of_translation

Read up on original IMTFI-funded research project: https://www.imtfi.uci.edu/research/2015/paek_2015.php

Cash as a Public Good - the Expert View

Currency News™ interviewed IMTFI Director and Professor Bill Maurer and Dr. Ursula Dalinghaus about the role of cash as a public good and the IMTFI following the release of Cash Matters white paper, "Virtually Irreplaceable: Cash As Public Infrastructure", authored by Dr. Dalinghaus, affiliated scholar at the IMTFI.

L: Maurer, UCI/IMTFI; R: Dalinghaus, Ripon College/IMTFI

Q: What is the main focus of the institute?

BM: We want to understand how people’s diverse interactions with money are being reshaped by new technologies, from new payment platforms to things like artificial intelligence in providing financial advice or in creating alternatives to traditional credit scores.

But, again this is crucial, we focus on the user side of the equation, on people’s actual interactions with money and these technologies, down to the level of questions like, where do they keep their money, and why? What does their daily transactional life look like? What are the diverse systems and beliefs that inform their money practices?

We developed the concepts of monetary ecology and monetary repertoires to capture this people-centered approach to money and technology.

Q: IMTFI was initially funded by the Gates Foundation, major supporters of the Better than Cash Alliance. The IMTFI is neutral when it comes to payments; however, there is an increasing focus on cash. What caused this development?

BM: We realized pretty quickly that there were a couple of very general things going on, almost everywhere around the world.

First, most of the new mobile money systems in which the Gates Foundation was initially interested as potentially banking the unbanked were in fact serving as payment rails – not as means of saving but as a means of moving money. This made us focus more and more on payment systems as a distinctive area of research.

Second, pretty much universally, we found that new systems were not replacing old ones; they were instead being added into the mix. People would use one payment method for one kind of transaction, and other payment methods for others. But nothing was replacing anything else. I think a lot of people initially thought that things like mobile money would displace cash. Instead, mobile money became a way for people more efficiently to move money and access it in the form of cash.

Q: What is the key takeaway of your white paper on cash as a public good?

UD: That physical cash will continue to have a vital and complementary role to play alongside digital well into the future, not only as a method of payment but also as a democratizing force – an important form of power-sharing between issuer and user that is distinct from digital-based money.

One reason is that people value the ability to choose from multiple payment forms. Another, even more substantial argument for cash, is that the cash infrastructure serves a vital public role since cash can circulate independently of its issuer and it can work offline.


Read full interview in this excerpt of Currency News, Vol 17 - No. 8/August 2019.

Read original post, "Bill Maurer, Director of the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion (IMTFI), talks about the ongoing relevance of cash"

The Director of the IMTFI is Professor Bill Maurer, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of the Filene Research Institute, Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He will also be one of the keynote speakers at the ICA’s Global Currency Forum 2020 in Barcelona.

Dr Dalinghaus, Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Ripon College, is also an affiliated scholar at the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion (IMTFI), University of California at Irvine, which has made itself a name as one of the leading institutes when it comes to the role of money in people’s daily lives and practices, and to the best way to go about financial inclusion.

The Missing Piece of the Fintech Puzzle: How Local, Informal Networks Play a Crucial Role in Remittances

by Daivi Rodima-Taylor and Bill Maurer in NextBillion

Kuria cash contribution group in Tarime highlands, Tanzania. 

We are in the middle of the “fintech age,” a time of rapid development and adoption of new financial and payment technologies worldwide. The spread of fintech is not just touching more lives; it is bringing those users, and their relations, directly into the realm of finance.

The impacts of this transformation range from exciting to troubling. To take just one example, digital payment infrastructures spreading in the Global South make visible the digital footprints of billions of people who have not been part of the formal sector. On the one hand, this is making credit available to customers who’ve long lacked access – but on the other, it may bring along exploitative “dataveillance” and over-indebtedness.

Whatever their impacts, fintech initiatives in emerging markets often build on interpersonal patterns of mutuality, fostering and capturing diverse “sharing economies” and bringing the affective into the purview of formal finance. In other words, these initiatives tend to harness existing community networks and informal methods of transacting, aiming to reflect or replicate their dynamics through formal products.

The interaction of local informal institutions and norms with formal digital finance initiatives is particularly pronounced in the Global South. But these interpersonal dynamics are vastly underexplored, and their significance underestimated. We argue that fintech endeavors in the payments and remittances space tend to overlook how their efforts are mediated and adapted by local gatekeepers. These gatekeepers may range from mobile money agents to neighborhood shopkeepers, and they mitigate the diverse risks of money transfer, and direct the new resources into socially acceptable pathways.

Put simply, we often err in assuming a remittance is a person-to-person transfer. Often, it’s a person-to-intermediary-to-person transfer (sometimes with several intermediaries along the way). Intermediaries fulfill a host of functions for the end points of a transfer, serving as guides, translators, helpers and guardians of values beyond the economic. Understanding these roles has implications for service design – in this article, we’ll examine them in more detail.

The Role of Gatekeepers – and the Meaning of Money
International and domestic remittances remain central to the livelihoods of many households globally. Officially recorded global remittance flows have nearly doubled over the past decade, growing from US $380 billion in 2007 to US $689 billion in 2018. They constitute the largest foreign capital inflows to many world regions. Our recent research shows that the remittance infrastructures in the digital age – including mobile and digital currencies, “traditional” remittance companies like Western Union, and other fintech players – are best seen as multi-level, fragmented and overlapping assemblages of diverse pathways. These pathways often include monopolistic companies like Moneygram (which provides cross-border remittances) and Safaricom (which distributes Moneygram remittances via mobile money transfers in-country). These different networks are kludged together and mediated at their connection points by diverse social and institutional gatekeepers. These gatekeepers may include local mobile money agents, informal savings groups and alternative moneylenders, and also retail shops and pawnbrokers that facilitate remittances – all of whom often help traverse the “last mile” to end-users.

Mobile money agent in Gulu, North Uganda. 

These gatekeepers often become part of the “story” behind the funds they help distribute, as these seemingly interpersonal money flows are actually an important repository of meaning and social markers. That is, the money carries social and moral commentary while chronicling people’s daily lives and trajectories, reflecting the memories and intentions of individuals and their social networks. For example, money gifts may mark human relationships and celebrate temporal cycles, such as the hong bao of the Chinese New Year – red envelopes containing money, exchanged among friends and relatives. Not surprisingly, the payment function of China’s ubiquitous messaging app, WeChat, only gained traction when it let people send each other digital hong bao, thus harnessing existing cultural beliefs and practices around money.

To grasp why it’s so important to understand the different cultural meanings behind money flows, consider the Kuria people of northeast Tanzania. In this community, informal agricultural labor sharing groups draw on longstanding norms of reciprocity, and have morphed into cash mediators in modern money transactions. These mediators fulfill the role of safely and morally bringing outside flows of money to those inside the group. Their role is consistent with Kuria cosmology, which highlights a constant mediated interchange with the outside, using the metaphor of the “throat” or “windpipe” (omooyo) for transactional pathways.

Consider how this is similar to and different from hong bao. To the Chinese, these red envelopes signify luck and protection against evil spirits, whereas to the Kuria, omooyo signifies the pathways that connect inside and outside. Designers of digital money systems have an easier time adopting cultural practices like hong bao, which can be easily seen, than social relationships like those represented by omooyo, which are difficult to detect unless you are enmeshed in them. Therefore, when users report on surveys that they use mobile money for something like “school fees,” for example, a product designer needs to look a little deeper to see through whose hands and phones the money actually passes along the way to its destination, and what relationships are activated in the process. This may reveal insights like those found in western Kenya, where “school fees” payments frequently take an important detour through coming-of-age rituals that stitch together city, country and kin.

The Importance of Local Intermediaries
In African societies, the role of marking and channeling any new resources has long been performed by informal mutual support groups and peer networks like the Kuria labor-sharing groups. These groups remain important actors in channeling e-money in modern-day mobile money systems. They help redistribute and circulate money along their established social networks, based on reciprocity and mutual obligation.

But the effects are sometimes contradictory. In some instances, mobile money networks can facilitate resource pooling and sharing among extended kin and peer groups – and this can foster new connections. In other cases, the availability of digital remittances can lessen interpersonal contacts and weaken social and family ties, as it eliminates the need for physical travel, in-person meetings and visits back home. Yet, in still other cases, the weakening of some ties can strengthen others: Removing physical distance and travel can facilitate women’s networks separate from men’s, which can mobilize resources to support the women’s goals—for instance, in subverting male elders’ choice of one marriage partner over another.

For these reasons, providers should focus substantial attention on such intermediaries, including the mobile money agents – or “cash merchants” – who buy and sell e-money. They are crucial to the cash-in, cash-out process of using mobile money – but in many emerging countries, they do much more. Many are local shopkeepers, part-time retailers and hawala remittance distributors. They have their own embedded systems of relational contracting and social expertise. They are not, in other words, mere “human ATMs,” but rather they interject their social relationships into transactions to facilitate their customers’ actual intended goals (holding e-money or cash for them for a time, assisting with bill payment, and providing financial advice or loans). Hence, agents do not just facilitate transfers, but broker and redistribute remittance flows. Mobile money companies may try to break these old habits, but in trying to do so, they also make their service less valuable to the people who want to use it to facilitate all the things an intermediary can accomplish for them.

Bringing Intermediaries into Focus
Diverse human and social intermediaries in local communities are thus important elements in emerging digital infrastructures. Bringing into contact different recording devices, accounting practices, and purposes and intentionalities, these local gatekeepers transform and co-create the payments infrastructures. As they cut into these interpersonal exchange networks, digital payment platforms act as novel interfaces between formal and informal economies.

A focus on the social relations of digital payment infrastructures enables us to see what is obscured by the seeming neutrality or seamlessness of the technology. In an age where digital infrastructures increasingly leverage futuristic technologies like self-learning algorithms and smart contracts, it is particularly important to remember that “old fashioned” social intermediaries often play a central role in their adaptation and use. Designing systems with intermediaries in mind from the beginning, not as passive pass-through points but active brokers, might enable such technologies to get further reach without sidelining the human interconnections people often use money flows to forge and maintain.

Daivi Rodima-Taylor is an anthropologist and Africanist at the Frederick Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University, and Visiting Researcher at University of California, Irvine.

Bill Maurer is Professor of Anthropology and Law, University of California, Irvine, and Director of the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI).

Photo credits: Daivi Rodima-Taylor.

View original post on NextBillion: https://nextbillion.net/fintech-local-networks-remittances/

Virtually Irreplaceable: Cash as Public Infrastructure

New study, "Virtually Irreplaceable: Cash as Public Infrastructure", substantiates the case for how and why cash must be regarded as a public good.

Click to download white paper

The paper by Dr. Ursula Dalinghaus, Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Ripon College and affiliated scholar at the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion  (IMTFI) University of California, takes a close look at the role of cash in society and the specific characteristics making it a public good, citing relevant studies, scholars and field experiments.

“Cash in circulation is growing on a global scale by approximately 3% per year; 80% of all payments worldwide are cash transactions. Cash is an essential part of every stable financial and economic system”, stated ICA Chairman Wolfram Seidemann. “This paper demonstrates that cash is more than just a means of payment. It is a public good, part of modern life and vital for people’s everyday lives.”

Key takeaways

• Cash is a public good that guarantees ease of use, accessibility, privacy, and many other unique qualities in local, national, and global monetary systems. Cash fulfills both criteria for a public good: it is non-excludable because its function as a means of payment, of transfer of value, works without compensation. And it is non-rivalrous because its use by one person does not preclude its use by another.

• Cash is public – the only form of money not controlled by a private, profit-driven entity. Once in circulation, it is the only form of payment independent of its issuer. It is deployed not to make a profit on its transfer but to support and sustain value transfers free of charge. There may be costs associated with cash, but cash itself is a means of value transfer that settles at face value with no fees involved.

• Cash enables personal freedom and self-determination – state-issued physical cash is a distributed public infrastructure that allows citizens and users to create a space outside the state. At the same time, cash acts as a claim upon central banks and, ultimately, states to ensure good governance of monetary and payment systems.

• The materiality of cash is vital to many social practices. The role cash plays in social relationships often hinges on the physical design of cash, such as denomination, which makes cash particularly useful for budgeting, accounting, gifting, or saving.

Download white paper - US Letter (8.5" x 11")

Download white paper - A4 Size (8.27" x 11.69")

Read interview with author here.

This is the second study by Cash Matters, a movement by the International Currency Association, ICA. The first study, “Keeping Cash – Assessing the Arguments about Cash and Crime” was published in September 2017. 

The Faketoshi Circus: Even Bitcoin Can’t Escape the Politics of Money

by Michael J Casey, chairman of CoinDesk’s advisory board and a senior advisor for blockchain research at MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative

In case you missed it, a new self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto came out of the woodwork last week, this one brandishing a “proof” based on numerology and an obsession with BCCI, the scandal-ridden bank that collapsed in 1991.

The widely debunked “reveal” from Bilal Khalid, aka James Caan – Khalid officially changed his name to that of the American actor – followed a host of equally absurd developments in a Florida court case against the other “Faketoshi,” Craig S. Wright. These included a hand-written note to the judge in which yet another person, one Debo Jurgen Etienne Guido, also laid claim to being bitcoin’s secret progenitor.

Sensible minds in the crypto community remind us that this is all a sideshow, that these competing claims to bitcoin’s creation ultimately mean nothing to its value proposition.

Still, it begs the question: why does it keep happening? Why do the scammers emerge so readily? What is about the crypto community that attracts a parade of false prophets?

Let’s take the question further: why does crypto generate so much drama generally? Bitter feuds over software forks; relentless conspiracy theories; disputes between maximalists, altcoiners, nocoiners and shitcoiners; competing social media memes; token “armies;” Twitter trolls; fraudsters of all kinds – it’s the crypto circus, and many of us secretly love it, at least in doses.

But why? How did a technology spawned by the most math-driven, nerdy and precision-obsessed fields of computer science give rise to Mexican telenovela-like stream of plot twists?

Other open-source tech communities generate their fair share of drama too, of course. (Type in “Linux community” into a Google search and it auto-completes to “Linux community toxic.”) The leaderless structure of open-source projects means there’s no central authority or pooled profit interest policing behavior or managing the external messaging.

Still, the crypto soap opera takes things to another level of madness. Why?

Learning from ancient history
My attempt at an explanation begins with the fact that, unlike other technologies, this is one is fundamentally about money.

“Money has historically been a political process, a process through which people or states or some kind of entity consolidates authority over others,” says Bill Maurer, Dean of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, an anthropologist who has studied the culture and history of money, adding:

“So, you have this big paradox with something like bitcoin, where its very idea is that there shouldn’t be any one person or authority in control…But because of that, you get this cacophony of voices, each claiming to have some kind of truth and striving to be the one in control.”

For the full story, please visit https://www.coindesk.com/the-faketoshi-circus-why-even-bitcoin-cant-escape-the-politics-of-money