On the invitation of Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Didier Reynders, conference to the Belgian diplomats in order to draw the challenges that they are facing against the emergence of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, GAFA and BATX...

1. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
Palais d’Egmont, 17 Avril 2018
Dominique Mangiatordi

2. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
• Intro
• GAFAM-BATX / Big Data and Privacy Control
• Artificial Intelligence - Singularity
• The New Crypto Cold War, Fake News
• Q&A

3. INTRODUCTIONIn this era of technology & data, how do you Diplomats feel?

4. PARIS
PHILADELPHIE
1778

5. 3rd Nov NATIONAL CONGRESS
4th Nov LONDON CONFERENCE
Talleyrand proposal
vs Gendebien’s refusal
1830

6. MASS MEDIA
INFLUENCE
1940

7. 2018
HOLLYWOOD

8. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
At the time of Benjamin Franklin’s stint as U.S. Ambassador in Paris,
it would take about six months for his diplomatic dispatches to
reach his government in Philadelphia. So if diplomacy was to be at
all effective, ambassadors had to make fateful decisions on behalf
of their government autonomously, based on their own
understanding of their nation’s interests and policies, without
getting any prior go-ahead for what they did, hence the quaint
ambassadorial title “extraordinary and plenipotentiary.”
INTRO

9. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
I’m guessing a number of ambassadors today would happily
trade-in the daily back-and-forth with HQ for a return to the old
way of doing things. But the “good old days” are long gone, and
the volume and frequency of communication between a diplomat
and her capital are the tip of the iceberg of the information
revolution. Three fundamental changes to the nature of diplomacy
stand out above the rest.
INTRO

10. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
The first and most important change is a shift in balance from
government-to-government diplomacy to people-to-people
diplomacy. Communication between political leaders by
diplomatic proxy still has an important role to play, and some form
of public diplomacy was also practiced in the past. But nation
states and their governments no longer play the preeminent role in
our lives that they did 100 years ago. Being a government official
no longer gives you the privileged status of the past—if anything, it
only earns you suspicion.
INTRO

11. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
In today’s world, it is increasingly corporations, civil society groups,
cultural movements and, most important, ideas—which know no
national boundaries and are not citizens of any state—that shape
our lives. Online platforms have more of an effect on more people
today than most governments, and the essential thing about these
platforms is that they make their impact by facilitating direct
interaction between infosumers across political divides.
INTRO

12. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
This means that if diplomacy is to keep up with the world, it must
focus on participating in the myriad of emerging global
conversations. The name of the game is relevance. A diplomatic
service that is stuck in the mind-frame of broadcasting and fails to
narrow-cast to the wide spectrum of passions, priorities and
identities which make up the contemporary polity, will be quick to
lose its value.
INTRO

13. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
The complexity of the tools a diplomat must be able to deploy and
the diversity of the audiences she must be able to address require
genuine specialist skills. Just to keep abreast of the public sphere in
which contemporary diplomacy operates requires high-
performance social media skills, the ability to interpret the output
of big-data analytics and the same proficiency in the use of focus
groups and polling that is expected of a corporate marketing
professional. Jack of all trades and ace of none is a losing hand in
the contemporary diplomatic game. I believe strongly that
technology is making diplomacy a more dynamic, exciting, and
creative profession.
INTRO

14. INFLUENCEIN DIPLOMACY

15. 1770-1850
1870-1910
2000-now
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
2nd INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
NBIC

16. nanotechnologies
biotechnologies
HUMAN ENGINEERING

17. cognitive science
artificial intelligence
HUMAN BEHAVIOUR CONTROL

18. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
3 main differences with the previous revolutions
Belgium was ahead…
NBIC is about modifying
the human being, not only the planet or things.
NBIC has no clear predictable future.

19. THE
TECHPLOMAT
GAFA A.I.
FAKE NEWS CYBERSECURITY
Transhumanism
MACHINE LEARNING

20. GAFAM-NATU-BATX!
What the hell?
1

21. “The danger is that we
are too slow and that
the world is destroying
us while we are still
asking who really owns
our data”

22. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
WORLD ECONOMY(gross domestic product 2016)
10%
0%
20%
22%

23. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
240 WORLD UNICORNS
50
0
100
64 10114 513 322
$790b

24. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
THE
UNICORNS
$1b valuation

26. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
CAN YOU NAME ONE
BELGIAN
UNICORN?

27. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
THE
CENTAURS
$100M valuation

28. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY

29. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
THE
DRAGONS
INVEST R.O.I. STARTUP

30. GAFAMNATUBATX

31. INFLUENCE
Are the GAFABATX a
Super-Power?

32. 21. GAFAM ($649Mds)
25. BELGIUM ($492Mds)
21. GAFAM ($649Mds)
25. BELGIUM ($492Mds)

33. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook combined
turned over $650 billion last year. Their main revenue
sources are rather different, and at this stage they are still
reliant on one one part of their business - i.e. Facebook
generating 98 percent of its revenue from advertising alone.

38. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
Google is the dominant search engine with over 77% of global
searches going through Google (Source: NetMarketShare.com).
Despite the fact that 1.3B people (there are only 7.6B people
globally) live behind China’s Firewall, Google still owns over ¾ of
the search engine market. This dominance has fueled Google’s
historic rise.
86.5% of Alphabet’s revenue comes from advertising, primarily
search ads (Source: Statista).

39. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY

40. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
Youtube is the second largest search engine in the world, and
easily the largest user-generated video platform. Users upload an
impossible 100 hours of content to Youtube every minute.
And Credit Suisse believes that in 2015, Youtube and Google Play
accounted for ~15% of Google’s revenue (up from 4% in 2010), and
forecasted to reach 24% by 2020.

41. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
The other piece of Google’s advertising supremacy is their
partner network, AdSense. AdSense allows sites to monetize
through Google’s advertising platform without worrying about the
backend or finding advertisers.
Instead, Google handles everything and takes a between 32 and
49 percent of ad revenue generate (the rest going to publishers).
According to Investopedia, AdSense revenues accounted for
$15.5B, ie 23% of Google’s total revenue in 2016.

43. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
L’objectif de DeepMind est de « résoudre l'intelligence ». Pour
atteindre ce but, l'entreprise essaie de combiner « les meilleures
techniques de l'apprentissage automatique et des neurosciences
des systèmes pour construire de puissants algorithmes
d'apprentissage généraliste ». L'entreprise souhaite non seulement
doter les machines d'intelligence artificielle performante, mais
aussi comprendre le fonctionnement du cerveau humain.

45. Le flux des ventes d'armes et de munitions alimente les conflits
mondiaux, mais il est difficile d'en retrouver l'origine. En partenariat
avec l'Igarapé Institute, Jigsaw a créé un modèle de représentation
des données qui localise le commerce d'armement légal dans le
monde et permet d'identifier les pays qui les vendent et ceux qui les
achètent. Cet outil permet aux journalistes, aux diplomates et aux
activistes de comprendre l'influence du commerce des armes et des
munitions sur la géopolitique mondiale.
The Arms Globe

46. Il est difficile de trouver des informations fiables sur l'évolution du
conflit en Syrie et la désintégration du gouvernement de Bashar Al-
Assad. En partenariat avec Al Jazeera, nous avons créé un outil qui
tire parti des médias sociaux pour obtenir des informations de façon
participative sur les défections des officiels syriens et leur
rapprochement avec l'opposition.
Syria Defection Tracker

47. Gangs de Los Angeles, groupes de skinheads en Europe ou
djihadistes au Moyen-Orient… L'expérience des jeunes gens qui
rejoignent des groupes radicaux et violents est incroyablement
similaire. Nous avons créé le réseau Against Violent Extremism
Network en partenariat avec l'Institute for Strategic Dialogue afin
de mettre en place une plate-forme permettant à d'anciens
membres de groupes extrémistes de collaborer pour empêcher
d'autres jeunes de se joindre à des groupes similaires.
Against Violent Extremism Network

48. Propos injurieux, menaces et harcèlement viennent souvent polluer
les discussions sur Internet. Nous essayons de développer un
système informatique capable de comprendre à grande échelle les
nuances et le contexte de ce type de propos. Si le projet aboutit,
l'apprentissage informatique pourrait aider les éditeurs de contenus
sur Internet et les modérateurs à améliorer la qualité des
commentaires publiés sur leurs plates-formes et l'échange des idées
sur Internet. Le premier produit issu de Conversation AI est
Perspective.
Conversation AI

49. Perspective est une API qui utilise l'apprentissage automatique pour
identifier les abus et le harcèlement sur Internet. Perspective évalue
les commentaires en fonction de l'impact ressenti qu'ils peuvent
avoir dans une discussion, ce qui permet aux éditeurs de réagir en
temps réel au contenu publié, aux modérateurs de trier les
commentaires plus efficacement et aux lecteurs de trouver des
informations pertinentes plus facilement. Notre premier spécimen
est capable de déterminer si un commentaire peut être perçu
comme "toxique" dans une discussion.
Perspective API

50. Des organes de presse du monde entier sont victimes de
cyberattaques qui paralysent leurs activités lorsqu'ils publient des
articles controversés ou critiques envers de puissantes institutions.
Project Shield utilise l'infrastructure de Google pour protéger les
sites d'information indépendants des attaques par déni de service
distribué (DDoS), un type d'attaque informatique ayant pour but de
rendre indisponible un site Web en inondant ses serveurs à l'aide
d'une "armée" composée de milliers, voire de millions d'ordinateurs.
Project Shield

51. Digital Attack Map

52. L'une des plus grandes menaces à l'encontre de la liberté
d'expression est la censure invisible. Unfiltered News relève les
actualités importantes qui sont susceptibles de ne pas avoir été
traitées dans votre pays, à l'aide du corpus de Google News, afin de
dévoiler aux utilisateurs les faits qui sont passés sous silence dans
certains pays, de révéler la façon dont certains pays traitent
l'actualité et comment la couverture médiatique d'un événement
évolue dans le temps.
Unfiltered.News

53. Journalists need safe access to information to research issues,
communicate with sources, and report the news. Outline makes it
easy for news organizations to set up a virtual private network (VPN)
on their own server. This gives news organizations the power to
provide anyone in their organization safer access to the internet and
keep their communications private.
Outline

54. Des groupes radicaux et violents comme Daech se servent
d'Internet pour diffuser leur propagande et recruter de nouveaux
membres. Redirect Method cible les personnes qui cherchent de
façon active des contenus radicaux et des contacts dans ces
milieux. Au lieu de créer du contenu et de présenter des contre-
exemples, notre approche consiste à éloigner les jeunes attirés par
ces groupes extrémistes à l'aide de contenu existant déjà sur
YouTube et de publicités ciblées.
Redirect Method

55. Pour les enquêteurs qui travaillent sur des crimes de guerre, pouvoir
traiter des centaines d'heures de vidéo peut faire la différence entre
trouver la preuve des atrocités commises et rater un détail crucial.
Montage fournit aux enquêteurs des outils pour analyser de
grandes quantités de vidéos YouTube et s'est révélé particulièrement
efficace pour analyser des images tournées en Syrie, par exemple.
Montage

56. Nous avons rencontré des officiers de police qui travaillent dans
certains des quartiers les plus dangereux du monde, des favelas de
Rio de Janeiro aux bidonvilles du Cap. Copcast est un projet Open
Source permettant de transformer n'importe quel téléphone
Android en caméra-piéton, afin de fournir une solution simple et
économique aux représentants de la loi du monde entier. Copcast
améliore la surveillance policière dans le but de renforcer la sécurité
des personnes.
Copcast

57. Pour les journalistes d'investigation, les archives financières sont des
preuves qui révèlent la corruption et les crimes dont les
gouvernements se rendent coupables. Investigative Dashboard
permet de consulter des documents publics (archives financières ou
foncières) pour aider les journalistes qui enquêtent sur le
blanchiment d'argent ou la corruption. Cet outil permet également
aux enquêteurs et aux journalistes de travailler de façon
collaborative, en créant une plate-forme de données pour étayer
leur travail d'investigation.
Investigative Dashboard

58. “Don’t be the evil”

59. « Robots will equal humans in 2029, and we will
transfer brains on hard drive at the same
moment »
« Ray Kurzweil, Head of AI, Google

61. « “Je suis convaincu que certains
dans cette salle vivront 1000 ans !”
« Laurent Alexandre

63. 1/3
As of June 2017, Facebook hit an
unprecedented 2B MAUs (monthly active
users). That is nearly ⅓ of the population.

64. Facebook has over 2B monthly active users — yet despite the massive
market penetration, they are still growing 16% year-over-year.

66. The lion share of growth has been mobile
advertising — with mobile now accounting for
86% of their revenue — better than ANYONE
expected.

68. Today digital advertising is a
duopoly, with Google and Facebook
attracting between 57–84% of
global digital (outside of China)
depending on the source.
(Source — FT.com, Recode).

69. Scarier still is the fact that the duopoly is
taking >99% of new growth is digital ad
spend (as of Q3 2016).
Source — FT.com, Recode

70. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 for
a $1B for a pre-revenue company with
30M users (formed only 2 years prior).
After waiting 3 years to monetize (to focus
on growth), Instagram turned on ads and
became a cash cow.

73. Facebook bought Whatsapp in February of
2014 for a whopping $19B, which again
seemed absurd.
But Facebook’s business has ALWAYS been
built around attention, eyeballs, and
waiting to monetize. And if Instagram is any
indication, they know what they are doing.

75. THE CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA AFFAIR

77. When Facebook opened its API in
2008, the platform spawned a
completely new way of
distributing apps on the web.
Developers now had
unprecedented access and deep
integration into many of
Facebook’s core features,
allowing anyone to sign up and
start building.

78. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
Christopher
WILLIE
THE CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA AFFAIR
ALEKSANDR
KOGAN
C-A CO-FOUNDER
RUSSIAN-AMERICAN
DATA SCIENTIST
FUNDED BY LUKOIL
ALERT LAUNCHER
DATA MINING EXPERT
ALEXANDER
NIX
C-A CEO
BLACKMAILING CASES
STEVE
BANNON
CEO BREITBART NEWS
Camb.ANAL. BOARD MEMBER
TRUMP CAMPAIGN’s DIRECTOR
SPECIAL ADVISOR
ROBERT
MERCER
US CONSERVATIVE BILLIONNAIRE
INVESTOR BREITBART NEWS
INVESTOR CAMB.ANALYTICA
BREXIT/FARAGE CONNECTION
VagiT
Alekperov
CEO LUKOIL
PALAIS D’EGMONT
17th APRIL

80. Understanding the empire
Amazon’s business is made up of five primary
divisions: Amazon.com, AWS, Alexa, Whole Foods
Market and Amazon Prime.
Each on its own would be an impressive business.
Combined they create the world’s largest flywheel.

82. Amazon’s is the most monopolistic and well-
positioned marketplace the Western world has ever
seen. Last year they did $136B in revenue with
double-digit growth every year.
2017 estimates show a staggering 44% of US e-
commerce occurred on Amazon.com (Source:
Recode). And Amazon has been growing at least 13%
YoY (year-over-year) for each of the last 5 years.
It isn’t just a monopoly, it is accelerating.

84. Amazon Basics, where Amazon analyzes 3rd party seller data and
copies the best performing products.
Ultimately Amazon wants to replace ALL 3rd party sellers/products
with Amazon Basics versions. Amazon wants to (and will) own the
customer and every ounce of margin that comes with it.
Marketplaces die when the creator becomes the competitor.

85. (NOTE: why Amazon isn’t forced to spinout AWS by regulators who manage antitrust actions?)
Amazon built AWS for their marketplace. They needed the ability to
host images and information for Amazon.com and Bezos being
Bezos, built the product in a modular fashion.
As AWS grew, Amazon constantly cut prices to crush competition,
making AWS the easy choice.
Today ~42% of the web is powered by AWS. That is more than
double Microsoft, Google and IBM (combined). Yet given the easy-
to-use system and affordable pricing, it makes sense.

88. And growth isn’t slowing, quite the opposite actually. AWS accounts
for 10% of Amazon’s overall revenue, with $4.6B in Q3 of 2017 (up
42% over last year) and $1.2B in profit (up 36% over last year).
Amazon owns the infrastructure the majority of the internet is built
on, can decentralization change that?

89. THE RISE OF
A SECOND
TECH SUPER POWER

92. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
Baidu is the first search engine in China and the 4th most visited
site on Earth. It comes with Baidu Map and movies and music.

93. Alibaba is the chinese Amazon but has
almost 2 times more users. It regularly hits
new e-commerce records and its market cap
has increased from $250b last year.

94. Alipay is now accepted in
Europe, i.e. in the Galeries
Lafayette

95. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
Leader in the video game industry, Tencent is also know
for its instant messaging system WeChat and its 900
million regular users. In 2017, Tencent valorisation was
superior to Facebook, with more than $523b.

96. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY

97. Xiaomi is the third biggest startup in the world,
just behind Uber and Didi (the Chinese Uber). Its
market shares are now superior to Samsung and
Apple. It just opened… a virtual bank.

98. A.I.
and transhumanism
2

100. “Whichever country leads the way in Artificial Intelligence
research will be the ruler of the world”
- Vladimir Putin

103. Why we will become AI assistants?

104. « L’intelligence artificielle va
sauver des vies, c’est à peu
près clair. Elle va améliorer la
condition humaine dans pas
mal de domaines. Maintenant,
il y a des dangers, c’est sûr. »
« Yann Lecun
Head of Facebook AI

105. FACIAL RECOGNITION

106. Alipay is now accepted in
Europe, i.e. in the Galeries
Lafayette

107. INSTANT TRANSLATION

109. PUBLIC SOCIAL SCORE

111. SOCIAL INFLUENCE
Conformity
Popularity
Relatedness

113. GAME TECHNIQUE / SOCIAL INFLUENCE
THE ROCKSTAR EFFECT

114. SNAPCHAT SPARKLES

115. Singularity is 30 years away.
Ray Kurzweil
Head of Google AI

119. 5%3%
40% 52%
CHINA USA EUROPE OTHERS
AI INVESTMENTS

120. TRANSHUMANISM
=
AI + NANO/BIOTECH

122. CYBERSECURITY
FAKE NEWS
A speed game
3

124. Belgian cybersecurity startup
fixes hole in US government
Wednesday, December 6, 2017 — Sweepatic, a Leuven
based cybersecurity startup, recently discovered and
secured a significant security gap in the digital
footprint of one of the US government institutions.

126. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
The cheerleader effect
also known as the group attractiveness effect, is the cognitive
bias which causes people to think individuals are more attractive
when they are in a group.

127. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
Occam's razor
Latin: lex parsimoniae "law of parsimony” is the problem-solving
principle that, when presented with competing hypothetical
answers to a problem, one should select the one that makes the
fewest assumptions.

128. THE RISE OF
TECHPLOMACY
OSTRICH EFFECT
In behavioral finance, the ostrich effect is the attempt made by
investors to avoid negative financial information. The name
comes from the common (but false) legend that ostriches bury
their heads in the sand to avoid danger.

130. CONCLUSIONS

131. Artificial Intelligence
Technology growingly impacting diplomacy
Fake News
Geodata
Machine learning
Voice recognition
Robots
Politics
Military
Culture
Religion
Economy
Nature

132. INFLUENCE IN DIPLOMACY
INFLUENCE IS DATA
INFLUENCE IS AI
INFLUENCE IS SOFTWARE
INFLUENCE IS PEOPLE