Snippings

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the residual correlation between AI adoption and recent productivity growth falls to essentially zero

From: AI and productivity – by Ernie Tedeschi – Stripe Economics.

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First, solopreneurship is growing faster than employer-business formation, and the acceleration is validated by multiple independent data sources, making it unlikely to be driven by a fraud wave. Second, both the number and share of solopreneurs reaching meaningful income thresholds is rising. And third, early signals indicate that AI is filling the capability gaps that once made hiring necessary—and doing so fast enough to show up in the income distribution.

From: The age of the solopreneur.

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The issue of privacy is complex and I think we all understand that it has nuances, edge cases and issues around rights and responsibilities that need society as a whole to consider and come up with new ethics and etiquette to see us through the coming era of always on, continual surveillance. This may have seemed a somewhat abstract discussion for privacy enthusiasts and policy wonks, but it really isn’t. And the imminent mass market explosion in smart glasses use means that we need to deal with ethics and etiquette as an absoute priority.

There is a need for urgency because of improvements in biometric identification, improvements in AI and improvements in camera technology. The issues around face recognition demand attention. There are already some illustrative use of the technology in the mass market that I’ve talked about before and used to sharpen my own thinking. So let’s just begin some thinking here with a few of those examples to help us calibrate

First of all, there’s the example of the devoted father in New York, who when he saw his daughter walk into a restaurant with her new boyfriend, immediately did what any loving parent would do. He took a picture of the young man and uploaded it to a face recognition service that reported back with the man’s name and details. He turned out to be a VC from San Francisco. I laughed out loud when I read that in response to this news, the father (who presumably had never met a VC) said “at least he wasn’t a charlatan”.

A second example, also from New York, concerns the furore around Madison Square Gardens using facial recognition technology to deny entrance to lawyers working for their opponents in a lawsuit. Now, while some people might regard barring lawyers from certain spaces to be an entirely reasonable adjustment to modern life, it does raise some serious questions about the ability of private companies to carry out and act on surveillance.

Finally, I’d like to raise the more recent example of the police use of facial recognition cameras in London. In the particular case of Croydon, the one that was in the news most recently, there is no doubt that the cameras did enable the police to catch and detain wanted persons. Most members of the general public, on the grounds that they’re generally speaking not criminals, seem to be in favour of the police using this technology. But again, it undoubtedly raises serious questions about the use of the technology and the circumstances under which the police are allowed to exploit it. 

Back to the smart glasses. Earlier this year I was at a conference in the Asia Pacific region where a speaker asked the audience to raise their hands if they were wearing glasses. I suppose about a third of us did. The speaker then predicted quite confidently that at the same conference two years from now, half of the audience would be wearing glasses. His reasoning was that smart glasses are a very natural and convenient interface. This idea of looking through the internet rather than looking at it is quite appealing. And you can see just how Metas sales of the smart glasses accelerated, not because of improvements in camera technology or battery technology or lenses or anything else like that, but because of the arrival of AI. I’m thinking about getting a pair and the only thing that is stopping me is that they don’t allow face recognition, which is my principal reason for wanting them.

I would love to be able to walk into a conference and, when someone comes up to me and says “Hi Dave”, be able to respond confidently with “Hi Steve, great to see you” instead of staring blankly while desperately tryign to recall the name of someone I’d met before, had liked, am interested to talk to. If my smart glasses could put a display in the bottom right of my vision scrolling “This is Tom Noyes. You read two of his articles last week. You last spoke to him a month ago and you have a Zoom meeting with him in the diary for next Friday”.

I can imagine how just such a service could work in such a way as to enhance secuirty and privacy together. Suppose it went something like this. The person in my field of view is Tom Noyes. The glasses take his picture and upload it to the services that have a privacy framework that I have agreed to. Let’s say these are LinkedIn and Signal. LinkedIn matches the picture to Tom Noyes and then checks Tom’s settings. He has “Smart Glasses Discovery” turned on. So the glasses can tell me anything about him that it on LinkedIn and then use his identity to check my LinkedIn activity, my e-mail, my calendar and so on. All good, and if LinkedIn offered this for £9.95 per month then I’d sign up for life right now.

If system had gone to LinkedIn and discovered that Tom had smart glass discovery turned off, then they would display in yellow “this person is known to you, but requests privacy”. And that’s fair enough. If the system can’t find his face on LinkedIn or Signal, then the glasses can display a message in red saying “person not known”.

That may not be exactly how things would work, but along those lines. And obviously we would want real security underpinning it all with verifiable credentials and whatnot. But you get my general point. This is kind of how things could work. But how does that scale? How would that work for society at large? If I’m walking down the street and I have Facebook face recognition turned on, and my glasses spot people in the street, should Facebook list their profiles for me? Add them to a list on Facebook that I can look it in the evening? Hhhmmm….

When I go somewhere and I don’t want anyone to know that I’m there could I just reach for my phone and turn off smart glass recognition and then turn it back on when I get home? It seems not beyond the bounds of human ingenuity to come up with a workable framework here. But that’s just the starting point. How would that framework interact with society’s wider demands? And how might they contribute?

While you’re thinking about that, let me divert you away for a moment.

TAGS

What if smart glasses allow you to turn people into Tiles? Suppose there is a missing child or a murderer on the loose. Could the police go to LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram with a court order and tell them to override the privacy settings? To report to them if anyone’s smart glasses see the missing child or the fleeing murderer? That seems like a useful service for society. I’m walking down the street. My glasses see a child who is reported as missing. My glasses don’t tell me anything about this because it’s none of my business. They just send the face, as with all other faces, to Apple. Apple match the face to social m edia profiles, police databases, government repositories and so on. They flag the missing child back to Apple, Apple send the pictures and the time and location to the police. I don’t know anything about this, any more than I know that my iPhone has reported an AirTag.

Great! But… to raise an obvious red flag, what if an arrest warrant is issued in a foreign country, with whom the UK has some form of agreement, to arrest a journalist because they wrote something in that foreign country, what should happen? Or what if the system gets hacked by agents of a foreign power who want to track down and murder a dissident? Or a disgruntled IT worker who wants to see his boss arrested on entirely bogus grounds?

People have already gone to jail becase of mistakes in face recognition and given that face recognition is a) unlikely to be 100% perfect in any foreseeable timeframe and b) vulnerable to adversarial camouflage, we might reasonably expect the problem to get considerably worse if half the population are walkign round with the smart glasses on and billions of faces are being sent to Apple, Meta and others every day.

. have a look at what Simon and his colleagues. They just have a look at what Simon and his colleagues are doing over at Blur ID. Full stop. Oh comma and by the way comma if anyone from Facebook is reading this and thinking about launching the people tag service. I’ve already left my desk and I’m heading down to the patent office.

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ules for tracking parties and monitoring secondary activity create a compliance regime that burdens every party with the need to understand the provenance of a coin. Can you imagine accepting $2000 for a new TV, shipping it out, then having your stablecoins burned?

From: FIncen / OFAC 303 Page Rule Squashes Stablecoin eCom Ambitions | Noyes Payments Blog.

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Elder fraud is a rapidly growing problem in the U.S. In 2024, Americans aged 60 and older lost $4.9 billion to scams — more than any other age group, according to the FBI. The average loss was $83,000.

From: Should a bank ever be liable when a customer gets scammed? | American Banker.

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Key insight: Cards are the major payment method for agentic commerce, but that will change as usage of the technology grows. 
What’s at stake: Not supporting local payments, such as digital wallets and account-to-account payments, will stymie the market’s growth potential.
Forward look: There are still technology challenges, including authentication, since most payment systems were designed for human users.

From: Agentic commerce has a payment tech opening for banks | American Banker.

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The thing is, whether we get a refund or not, we had to spend time fighting this nonsense. The scammers here are dumping the burden of proof onto consumers and ordinary small business people like these hotel operators, which is a form of social pollution. They may only steal money from a few of us, but they steal time from all of us. They are time bandits

From: Monopoly Round-Up: Living in an Age of Cheating Means Having Your Time Stolen Constantly.

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Scott Cornell, EVP and Crime and Theft Specialist at SPG Cargo & Logistics, confirmed that cargo thieves deliberately struck security escorts protecting two high-value technology shipments. The drivers continued with each load instead of stopping for help! Cornell linked both successful crimes to failures during carrier verification.

(It’s always about identity, right?)

He also talked about a big concentration around the theft of high-tech loads with loads intended for data centers as a leading target and confirmed $111 million in known reported thefts in June and Julty 2026.

Wow.

 

You can see the dynamic. Why knock off a truck full of cigarettes when you can knock off a truck full of H100s?

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The report data is clear, but McKinsey fails to acknowledge it: digital public infrastructure is what makes instant payments successful, while bank control kills them.

From: (10) Instant Payments Work When Banks Don’t Control Them.

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Peru is moving beyond electronic identity documents toward a true mobile digital identity ecosystem after approving the legal framework for its new digital national identity document (DNId), which will have the same legal status as the physical credential.
The regulations establish the legal, technical and operational rules for issuing and using the DNId while explicitly allowing other compliant digital wallets to participate in the ecosystem alongside Reniec’s own Peru Pass application.

Reniec is Peru’s National Registry of Identification and Civil Status, established under Law No. 26497 as an autonomous public body

From: Peru gives digital ID equal legal status to physical credential | Biometric Update.

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