I am just sitting in the room where Bertrand Ducastel is starting his speech about The Emotion of Identity, of course starting with a 2500-year old Texan religious painting.
Now, let’s go for the (live) meat. With cloud computing, it is hard to figure out where my computer is in the world, mostly for fiscal/manpower costs reasons. However, this has an impact on government, because governments may want to control where the data actually is.
In terms of security, the three words that come to mind are: Identity, Policy, Privacy. More precisely, Privacy comes with control, choice, and ownership; policy comes with rights, law, commerce, justice; and Identity comes with authentication, authority, reputation, persona.
In the cloud, the new social order is about virtual machines talking to other virtual machines. We started with personal computers, with a model centered on the individual, we then move to networks, centered on the group, and the current network of virtual machines is centered on congregations, close to full human societies.
Next, we get an overview of Maslow’s Pyramid, with a long explanation of bulla (mesopotamian smart cards). Now the question is: how does this scale apply to computers, as they get organized in complex societies, closer to human societies?
Next, Bertrand outlines the link between identity and trust. The first kind is differential identity, or trust by causality (basially, what you are): the second one is experiential identity, or trust by process (basically, what you own/get, this has been formalized in subjective logic). Something interesting is that humans have in history been identified mostly by process, whereas computers are more in causality. More and more, computers are being identified through reputation, and humans through biometrics.
Next recreation, about the compared trust infrastructures of United States and France/Europe. The Declaration of Independance and Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen are basic trust infrastructures, on which constitutions were built, and then, law systems, etc. It shows that the trust infrastructure is on top, followed by policy infrastructure, and that the same thing should apply to computing.
We then get to the main slide, about emotion and identity. Bertrand introduces a paper by Sheldon Stryker, Integrating Emotion into Identity Theory (2004). Identity is here about status, and when status goes down, emotion kicks in because we get upset. The main thing is about mirror neurons, in which the same neurons re excited when we eat and when we see somebody else eating. And this process is important, because it is about sharing emotions.
Next, privacy. The main statement is that “Privacy is the provisioning of identity”.
Finally, we get a Maslow scale of computer needs, which of course is topped by Computer Theology (recursive trust/policy infrastructure), reputation, and intimacy.
Well, that’s it, and that was pure Ducastel: cluttered, confusing, but full of interesting and inspiring bits.
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