Whataboutism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by B.D. McClay: “Attention is finite, the record of how we spend it public, and it is easy enough to check if somebody who tweets every day about Ukraine has ever tweeted about Yemen. Many people are inclined to give somebody they trust a pass; behavior that might attract loud condemnation of a stranger might be ignored if done by a friend. Sometimes, such inconsistencies, added up, indicate that somebody is untrustworthy, that her commitments are insincere, and that there is something manipulative about her public persona. But most of the time, I would hazard, they indicate that people do not live their lives striving for perfect consistency….

The Internet, however, has only one currency, and that currency is attention. On the Internet, we endlessly raise awareness, we platform and deplatform, we signal-boost and call out, and we argue about where our attention should be directed, and how. What we pay attention to and the language in which we pay attention are the only realities worth considering, which is one reason why stories are so often framed by the idea that nobody is talking about a problem, when the problem is often quite endlessly talked about—just not solved. Why isn’t the media covering this story? is a common refrain that is just as often accompanied by a link to an article about the story, which is how the complainer learned about it in the first place.

Attention can be paid and registered in many forms, but you pay attention online by making it known that you are paying attention. Your own expenditure is worthless unless other people are paying attention to you. As they do in regard to the currency of the analog world, people feel as though they get to judge how other people pay attention. Even though most actions are undertaken with some idea of gaining attention, to do something out of a blatant desire to attract attention is gauche and discrediting. People whose job is to translate attention into real money—celebrities, “influencers,” and so on—are often left walking a thin and ridiculous line. They must draw attention to some larger event going on in the world lest they be judged selfish, but their attempts to do so mostly underscore that drawing attention to something means very little…(More)”.

Artificial intelligence was supposed to transform health care. It hasn’t.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ben Leonard and Ruth Reader: “Artificial intelligence is spreading into health care, often as software or a computer program capable of learning from large amounts of data and making predictions to guide care or help patients. | Seth Wenig/AP Photo

Investors see health care’s future as inextricably linked with artificial intelligence. That’s obvious from the cash pouring into AI-enabled digital health startups, including more than $3 billion in the first half of 2022 alone and nearly $10 billion in 2021, according to a Rock Health investment analysis commissioned by POLITICO.

And no wonder, considering the bold predictions technologists have made. At a conference in 2016, Geoffrey Hinton, British cognitive psychologist and “godfather” of AI, said radiologists would soon go the way of typesetters and bank tellers: “People should stop training radiologists now. It’s just completely obvious that, within five years, deep learning is going to do better.”

But more than five years since Hinton’s forecast, radiologists are still training to read image scans. Instead of replacing doctors, health system administrators now see AI as a tool clinicians will use to improve everything from their diagnoses to billing practices. AI hasn’t lived up to the hype, medical experts said, because health systems’ infrastructure isn’t ready for it yet. And the government is just beginning to grapple with its regulatory role.

“Companies come in promising the world and often don’t deliver,” said Bob Wachter, head of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “When I look for examples of … true AI and machine learning that’s really making a difference, they’re pretty few and far between. It’s pretty underwhelming.”

Administrators say algorithms — the software that processes data — from outside companies don’t always work as advertised because each health system has its own technological framework. So hospitals are building out engineering teams and developing artificial intelligence and other technology tailored to their own needs.

But it’s slow going. Research based on job postings shows health care behind every industry except construction in adopting AI…(More)”.

The Decentralized Web: Hope or Hype?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Inga Trauthig: “The heavy financial losses of cryptocurrency holders in recent months have catapulted a relatively niche tech topic into public view. However, many investors originally did not emphasize economic gains as their primary motivation for supporting cryptocurrencies. A different motive was driving them: decentralization.

Cryptocurrencies, together with blockchain, belong to a broader field related to the decentralized Web (DWeb) or Web3, which is, however, characterized by some obscurity. In August 2022, many informed readers are likely to be able to explain bitcoin, but fewer will be able to explain differences between various DWeb services, or how content moderation on a new version of the internet works — or could work in future.

The DWeb currently is a movement of which some parts are heavily tied to blockchain as a revolutionary technology purported to resolve the current ills of the internet. But some in the movement disagree on the dogma of blockchain (together with incentive stimulus and game theory) as the Web’s saviour — while concurring on the basic tenet that the current internet space, Web 2.0, has been corrupted by centralization. In other words, the DWeb is a movement whose members share many ideals but differ in their approaches to achieving them. And, some parts of this movement have much broader reach than others. While bitcoin has swept the globe and managed to draw adherents in the Global North and South, social media DWeb services are still mostly used by the technological cognoscenti.

In effect, at the current stage, successes of a decentralized Web are few and far between. They relate to two main aspirations: first, the empirical (re-)decentralization of the internet, and second, an appeal to make the internet a good place (again). The latter is certainly tempting given that the Web 2.0 is regularly accused of enabling authoritarian movements and actors, or online radicalization…(More)”.

Measuring human rights: facing a necessary challenge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Eduardo Burkle: “Given the abundance of data available today, many assume the world already has enough accurate metrics on human rights performance. However, the political sensitivity of human rights has proven a significant barrier to access. Governments often avoid producing and sharing this type of information.

States’ compliance with their human rights obligations often receives a lot of attention. But there is still much discussion about how to measure it. At the same time, statistics and data increasingly drive political and bureaucratic decisions. This, in turn, brings some urgency to the task of ensuring the best possible data are available.

Establishing cross-national human rights measures is vital for research, advocacy, and policymaking. It can also have a direct effect on people’s enjoyment of human rights. Good data allow states and actors to evaluate how well their country is performing. It also lets them make comparisons that highlight which policies and institutions are truly effective in promoting human rights.

Good human rights data does more than simply evaluate how well a country is performing – it also identifies which policies and institutions are truly effective in promoting human rights

Such context makes it crucial to arm researchers, journalists, advocates, practitioners, investors, and companies with reliable information when raising human rights issues in their countries, and around the world…(More)”.

To Fix Tech, Democracy Needs to Grow Up

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Divya Siddarth: “There isn’t much we can agree on these days. But two sweeping statements that might garner broad support are “We need to fix technology” and “We need to fix democracy.”

There is growing recognition that rapid technology development is producing society-scale risks: state and private surveillance, widespread labor automation, ascending monopoly and oligopoly power, stagnant productivity growth, algorithmic discrimination, and the catastrophic risks posed by advances in fields like AI and biotechnology. Less often discussed, but in my view no less important, is the loss of potential advances that lack short-term or market-legible benefits. These include vaccine development for emerging diseases and open source platforms for basic digital affordances like identity and communication.

At the same time, as democracies falter in the face of complex global challenges, citizens (and increasingly, elected leaders) around the world are losing trust in democratic processes and are being swayed by autocratic alternatives. Nation-state democracies are, to varying degrees, beset by gridlock and hyper-partisanship, little accountability to the popular will, inefficiency, flagging state capacity, inability to keep up with emerging technologies, and corporate capture. While smaller-scale democratic experiments are growing, locally and globally, they remain far too fractured to handle consequential governance decisions at scale.

This puts us in a bind. Clearly, we could be doing a better job directing the development of technology towards collective human flourishing—this may be one of the greatest challenges of our time. If actually existing democracy is so riddled with flaws, it doesn’t seem up to the task. This is what rings hollow in many calls to “democratize technology”: Given the litany of complaints, why subject one seemingly broken system to governance by another?…(More)”.

(Re)making data markets: an exploration of the regulatory challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Linnet Taylor, Hellen Mukiri-Smith, Tjaša Petročnik, Laura Savolainen & Aaron Martin: “Regulating the data market will be one of the major challenges of the twenty-first century. In order to think about regulating this market, however, we first need to make its dimensions and dynamics more accessible to observation and analysis. In this paper we explore what the state of the sociological and legal research on markets can tell us about the market for data: what kind of market it is, the practices and configurations of actors that constitute it, and what kinds of data are traded there. We start from the subjective opacity of this market to researchers interested in regulation and governance, review conflicting positions on its extent, diversity and regulability, and then explore comparisons from food and medicine regulation to understand the possible normative and practical implications and aims inherent in attempting to regulate how data is shared and traded. We conclude that there is a strong argument for a normative shift in the aims of regulation with regard to the data market, away from a prioritisation of the economic value of data and toward a more nuanced approach that aims to align the uses of data with the needs and rights of the communities reflected in it…(More)”

Premium Based on ‘Like, Share and Post’: Use of Social Media Data in Life Insurance and Proxy Discrimination

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Salome Chapeyama Mdala: “Social media has become a massive resource of data such that data analytics firms can use social media platforms alone to extract valuable data for insurers. For example, Verisk Analytics and its subsidiary Insurance Services Offices (ISO), have long offered actuarial services to insurers and now offer social media analytics as part of their services. According to one of Verisk’s actuaries Jim Weiss, “insurers might want to consider how they can use data from social media to tailor offerings to prospective policyholders’ ‘likes’ and preferences.” Social media is a useful database for life insurers because the business of insurance is focused on classifying risks and tailoring premiums to suit the predicted risk. Social Media provides easily accessible data which may be beneficial for the insurance company in underwriting risks. For instance, life insurers can categorise individuals’ risks based on their diet, exercise routine, adventures, hobbies and so forth. Consumers do not have to go through an inconvenient question-and-answer session with their insurers because knowledge about them is readily accessible. However, the risk of unfair discrimination is a significant disadvantage of using social media data for underwriting purposes. Regulatory bodies are starting to provide guidelines about how insurers can use data mining to underwrite policies. The discussion is divided in three parts: the use of social media data in underwriting, proxy discrimination in life insurance and guiding principles in the use of external data sources in underwriting…(More)”

A South African City Says It’s Putting QR Codes On Informal Settlement Cabins To Help Services. But Residents And Privacy Experts Are Uncertain.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ray Mwareya: “Cape Town, South Africa’s second wealthiest city, is piloting a new plan for the 146,000 households in its informal settlements: QR-coding their homes.

City officials say the plan is to help residents get access to government services like welfare and provide an alternative to a formal street address so they can more easily get packages delivered or hail a taxi. But privacy experts warn that the city isn’t being clear about how the data will be stored or used, and the digital identification of poor Black residents could lead to retreading Cape Town’s ugly history of discrimination.

Cape Town’s government says it has marked 1,000 cabins in unofficial settlements with QR codes and made sure every individual’s information is checked, vetted, and saved by its corporate geographic information system.

Cape Town, South Africa’s second wealthiest city, is piloting a new plan for the 146,000 households in its informal settlements: QR-coding their homes.

City officials say the plan is to help residents get access to government services like welfare and provide an alternative to a formal street address so they can more easily get packages delivered or hail a taxi. But privacy experts warn that the city isn’t being clear about how the data will be stored or used, and the digital identification of poor Black residents could lead to retreading Cape Town’s ugly history of discrimination.

Cape Town’s government says it has marked 1,000 cabins in unofficial settlements with QR codes and made sure every individual’s information is checked, vetted, and saved by its corporate geographic information system…(More)”.

The fear of technology-driven unemployment and its empirical base

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Kerstin Hötte, Melline Somers and Angelos Theodorakopoulos:”New technologies may replace human labour, but can simultaneously create jobs if workers are needed to use these technologies or if new economic activities emerge. At the same time, technology-driven productivity growth may increase disposable income, stimulating a demand-induced employment expansion. Based on a systematic review of the empirical literature on technological change and its impact on employment published in the past four decades, this column suggests that the empirical support for the labour-creating effects of technological change dominates that for labour-replacement…(More)”.

Big, Open Data for Development: A Vision for India 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sam Asher, Aditi Bhowmick, Alison Campion, Tobias Lunt and Paul Novosad: “The government generates terabytes of data directly and incidentally in the operation of public programs. For intrinsic and instrumental reasons, these data should be made open to the public. Intrinsically, a right to government data is implicit in the right to information. Instrumentally, open government data will improve policy, increase accountability, empower citizens, create new opportunities for private firms, and lead to development and economic growth. A series of case studies demonstrates these benefits in a range of other contexts. We next examine how government can maximize social benefit from government data. This entails opening administrative data as far upstream in the data pipeline as possible. Most administrative data can be minimally aggregated to protect privacy, while providing data with high geographic granularity. We assess the status quo of the Government of India’s data production and dissemination pipeline, and find that the greatest weakness lies in the last mile: making government data accessible to the public. This means more than posting it online; we describe a set of principles for lowering the access and use costs close to zero. Finally, we examine the use of government data to guide policy in the COVID-19 pandemic. Civil society played a key role in aggregating, disseminating, and analyzing government data, providing analysis that was essential to policy response. However, key pieces of data, like testing rates and seroprevalence distribution, were unnecessarily withheld by the government, data which could have substantially improved the policy response. A more open approach to government data would have saved many lives…(More)”.