Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Claire L. Evans: “..Regardless of the medium, memory is survival. As a consequence, biology, with its billions of years of beta-testing in the rearview, has already produced the most powerful storage medium for information in the universe: DNA. Every nucleus of every cell in the human body holds 800 MB of information. In theory, DNA can store up to a billion gigabytes of data per cubic millimeter; with this efficiency, the 180-odd Zettabytes of information our global civilization produces each year would fit in a tennis ball. More importantly, it wouldn’t consume any energy—and it would be preserved for millennia.

This may all sound science-fictional, but over the last decade, technology companies and research institutions have successfully encoded all manner of precious cultural information into the double-helix: the works of Shakespeare, all 16GB of Wikipedia, an anthology of biotechnology essays and science fiction stories, the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault database, the private key of a single bitcoin, and the 1998 album Mezzanine by Massive Attack. Of course, these are PR gimmicks—snazzy proofs of concept for a nascent industry.

Could life, with its onboard resilience against entropic forces, provide a workable solution to the problem of the data center?

But beyond the hype, DNA data storage technology is evolving quickly, and biotech companies have pushed their offerings to the brink of commercial viability. Their approaches are diverse. Catalog, a Boston-based startup, has created a “printer” that can write synthetic DNA directly onto sheets of clear plastic; the French startup Biomemory stores data in credit-card sized “DNA Cards”; Atlas Data Storage, a spinoff of the biotechnology giant Twist Bioscience, encodes data onto synthetic DNA and then dehydrates it into a shelf-stable powder to be reconstituted at will. These propositions should be enticing to anyone tasked with maintaining the integrity of the cloud: plastic sheets, cards, and DNA powder, stashed in metal capsules the size of a AAA battery, don’t require air-conditioning. 

This makes DNA storage the perfect storage medium for what experts call “cold” data: things like municipal and medical records, backups, research data, and archives that don’t need to be accessed on demand (“hot” data, in contrast, is the kind found on Instagram, YouTube, or your banking app). Some 60–80% of all data stored is accessed infrequently enough to be classified as cold, and is currently stored in magnetic tape libraries. Tape, by virtue of its physical nature, is secure and requires minimal power to maintain. But even under perfect environmental conditions, cooled to a precise 20–25°C temperature range, it only lasts for a few decades, and the technology for playing back magnetic tape is likely to go obsolete before the tape itself degrades.

The oldest DNA sample to be successfully read, on the other hand, was over two million years old. And given its importance in the life sciences, it’s not likely we’ll ever forget how to sequence DNA. So long as the relevant metadata—instructions for translating the four-letter code of DNA back into binary—is encoded alongside the data itself, information preserved in DNA will almost certainly outlast the technology companies encoding it. This is why Microsoft, Western Digital, and a small concern of biotech companies cofounded, in 2020, the DNA Data Storage Alliance, an organization to define industry-wide standards for the technology. As with all software, the interoperability of genetic technology will be key to its longevity…(More)”.

Book by Betty Sue Flowers: “Leaders need well-developed foresight because all big decisions are influenced by their story of the future, whether they are aware of it or not. The “official story of the future” is a more or less coherent, more or less conscious, more or less shared narrative about what will happen in 3 months, 6 months, a year, or five years. But as Betty Sue Flowers points out, here’s the weird part: The future is a fiction. It doesn’t exist. Yet you can’t make rational strategic decisions without one.

To manage this, organizations analyze ever-growing volumes of information with increasingly sophisticated analytical techniques and produce forecasts that attempt to predict the future. However, data alone is not enough, and projections are always based on assumptions,  a common one being that things will keep trending as they are now.

When an important decision needs to be made, especially when the people involved in making that decision have opposing ideas about what should happen, it can be challenging to hold a generative dialogue rather than staging a fight. In this context, almost any discussion can immediately devolve into an argument. Scenarios can be very useful in creating a space for dialogue in which people can listen to each other and even help tell the story of a possible future that is not the one they most wish to create.

Flowers emphasizes that scenarios are not intended to be predictions.  Instead, they act as a stage setting for generative dialogues and much better decisions to be made.  By creating a set of different, plausible stories of the future, they are best used to:

• Create a container for frank, thoughtful, safe, imaginative conversations about how the organization might adapt if trends change.
• Disrupt assumptions sometimes unconsciously held in current stories.
• Stimulate more complex and informed stories of the future.
• Increase foresight and the organization’s ability to adapt, and
• Set the ground for generative dialogues that improve the organization in the present…(More)”.

Paper by Jonathan E. LoTempio Jr et al: “The bankruptcy of 23andMe was an inflection point for the direct-to-consumer genetics market. Although the privacy of consumer data has been highlighted by many as a concern, we discuss another key tension in this case: the corporate enclosure of scientific data that has considerable potential value for biomedical research and public health…

When genomic data are collected through explicit, opt-in consent for the express purpose of contributing to biomedical research, they occupy a category that is not easy to classify. Such data are not public resources in the traditional sense, but neither are they simply private commodities. Their value arises through collective participation and through the invocation of public benefit as a condition of the contribution. As such, the successive owners of such data must be legally required to preserve the public benefits and individual expectations associated with their original collection…(More)”.

Paper by Santiago Cueto, Diether W. Beuermann, Julian Cristia, Ofer Malamud & Francisco Pardo: “This paper examines a large-scale randomized evaluation of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program in 531 Peruvian rural primary schools. We use administrative data on academic performance and grade progression over 10 years to estimate the long-run effects of increased computer access on (i) school performance over time and (ii) students’ educational trajectories. Following schools over time, we find no significant effects on academic performance but some evidence of negative effects on grade progression. Following students over time, we find no significant effects on primary and secondary completion, academic performance in secondary school, or university enrollment. Survey data indicate that computer access significantly improved students’ computer skills but not their cognitive skills; treated teachers received some training but did not improve their digital skills and showed limited use of technology in classrooms, suggesting the need for additional pedagogical support…(More)”.

Article by Sam Peters: “How do you teach somebody to read a language if there’s nothing for them to read? This is the problem facing developers across the African continent who are trying to train AI to understand and respond to prompts in local languages.

To train a language model, you need data. For a language like English, the easily accessible articles, books and manuals on the internet give developers a ready supply. But for most of Africa’s languages — of which there are estimated to be between 1,500 and 3,000 — there are few written resources available. Vukosi Marivate, a professor of computer science at the University of Pretoria, in South Africa, uses the number of available Wikipedia articles to illustrate the amount of available data. For English, there are over 7 million articles. Tigrinya, spoken by around 9 million people in Ethiopia and Eritrea, has 335. For Akan, the most widely spoken native language in Ghana, there are none.

Of those thousands of languages, only 42 are currently supported on a language model. Of Africa’s 23 scripts and alphabets, only three — Latin, Arabic and Ge’Ez (used in the Horn of Africa) — are available. This underdevelopment “comes from a financial standpoint,” says Chinasa T. Okolo, the founder of Technēculturǎ, a research institute working to advance global equity in AI. “Even though there are more Swahili speakers than Finnish speakers, Finland is a better market for companies like Apple and Google.”

If more language models are not developed, the impact across the continent could be dire, Okolo warns. “We’re going to continue to see people locked out of opportunity,” she told CNN. As the continent looks to develop its own AI infrastructure and capabilities, those who do not speak one of these 42 languages risk being left behind…(More)”

Report by the Metagov community: “First, it identifies distinct layers of the AI stack that can be named and reimagined. Second, for each layer, it points to potential strategies, grounded in existing projects, that could steer that layer toward meaningful collective governance.

We understand collective governance as an emergent and context-sensitive practice that makes structures of power accountable to those affected by them. It can take many forms—sometimes highly participatory, and sometimes more representative. It might mean voting on members of a board, proposing a policy, submitting a code improvement, organizing a union, holding a potluck, or many other things. Governance is not only something that humans do; we (and our AIs) are part of broader ecosystems that might be part of governance processes as well. In that sense, a drought caused by AI-accelerated climate change is an input to governance. A bee dance and a village assembly could both be part of AI alignment protocols.

The idea of “points of intervention” here comes from the systems thinker Donella Meadows—especially her essay “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.” One idea that she stresses there is the power of feedback loops, which is when change in one part of a system produces change in another, and that in turn creates further change in the first, and so on. Collective governance is a way of introducing powerful feedback loops that draw on diverse knowledge and experience.

We recognize that not everyone is comfortable referring to these technologies as “intelligence.” We use the term “AI” most of all because it is now familiar to most people, as a shorthand for a set of technologies that are rapidly growing in adoption and hype. But a fundamental premise of ours is that this technology should enable, inspire, and augment human intelligence, not replace it. The best way to ensure that is to cultivate spaces of creative, collective governance.

These points of intervention do not focus on asserting ethical best practices for AI, or on defining what AI should look like or how it should work. We hope that, in the struggle to cultivate self-governance, healthy norms will evolve and sharpen in ways that we cannot now anticipate. But democracy is an opportunity, never a guarantee…(More)”

Book by Tom Williams: “… explores critical questions at the intersection of robotics and social justice. He considers the ways in which roboticists design their robots’ appearance, how robots think and act, how robots perceive people, and the domains into which robots are deployed. The book highlights not only the ways roboticists tend to reinforce white patriarchal power structures, but also how roboticists might instead subvert those power structures by applying theories and methods from a diverse range of fields.

Drawing on computer science; history and politics; law, criminology, and sociology; feminist, ethnic, and Black studies; literary and media studies; and social, moral, and cognitive psychology, the book connects questions of robot design with larger abolitionist movements by presenting a vision for a more socially just future of robotics…(More)”.

Interview by Margo Anderson: “For years, Gwen Shaffer has been leading Long Beach, Calif. residents on “data walks,” pointing out public Wi-Fi routers, security cameras, smart water meters, and parking kiosks. The goal, according to the professor of journalism and public relations at California State University, Long Beach, was to learn how residents felt about the ways in which their city collected data on them.

She also identified a critical gap in smart city design today: While cities may disclose how they collect data, they rarely offer ways to opt out. Shaffer spoke with IEEE Spectrum about the experience of leading data walks, and about her research team’s efforts to give citizens more control over the data collected by public technologies…Residents want agency. So that’s what led my research team to connect with privacy engineers at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. Norman Sadeh and his team had developed what they called the IoT Assistant. So I told them about our project, and proposed adapting their app for city-deployed technologies. Our plan is to give residents the opportunity to exercise their rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act with this app. So they could say, “Passport Parking app, delete all the data you’ve already collected on me. And don’t collect any more in the future.”..(More)”

Book edited by Luca Belli and Walter Britto Gaspar: “This book provides a comprehensive analysis of personal data protection frameworks within the BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—and explores the potential for enhanced cooperation as regards the management and regulation of international data flows, amongst the increasing number of new group members. This study is particularly relevant in light of the recent BRICS commitment, enshrined in the grouping’s 2024 Declaration, aimed at jointly promoting ‘a global framework for data governance’. The ways in which this policy objective can be achieved are explored in the conclusion of this volume, highlighting what concrete path might be realistically followed by the group. Drawing on the pioneering research of the CyberBRICS project, each chapter delves into the unique legislative landscapes of the member countries, highlighting significant regulatory developments such as Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (LGPD), Russia’s evolving privacy and data localization regulations, India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 and its Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture, China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), and South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). The authors examine the complexities and challenges each nation faces in harmonizing data protection with economic growth and technological innovation, while also addressing issues of national sovereignty, cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, and international coordination. A comparative analysis of the BRICS personal data architectures underscores the distinctive approaches and institutional frameworks adopted by BRICS countries and how this unusual grouping is growing, influencing an increasing number of countries with its policy and governance choices. The concluding chapter synthesizes these insights to offer concrete solutions and mechanisms for sustainable transborder data transfers and digital trade, emphasizing the importance of fostering legal interoperability and shared governance principles. By proposing model contractual clauses and strategic cooperation pathways, the book advocates for a shared BRICS stance on personal data protection, aiming to balance data subject rights with the imperatives of cybersecurity and digital sovereignty in a connected digital economy. This volume is an essential resource for policymakers, legal practitioners, and scholars interested in understanding a future where emerging economies are increasingly shaping the dynamics of data governance and digital cooperation…(More)”.

Article by John Thornhill: “…Trump’s Maga movement has also found its natural home on social media, with many thousands of accounts amplifying his messages. That makes it all the more jarring to discover that some of the most active “America First” accounts are run from abroad. 

In a move to secure “the integrity of the global town square”, the social media platform X last Friday began posting user location data. As a result, it emerged that dozens of influential Maga accounts are run out of foreign countries, including Russia, India and Nigeria. 

For example, the MAGA NATION account, which claims to be a “Patriot Voice for We The People” with more than 393,000 followers, is based in eastern Europe (Non-EU), X revealed.

Malign foreign actors are known to use imposter accounts — either to manipulate political debate or to generate traffic and make money. That is just one of the ways in which our infosphere is being deliberately degraded. 

There are three other types of social media deformities, too. Call them the four horsemen of the infocalypse. Unchecked, they will surely destroy our trust in almost anything we read online.

The second corrosive influence is how extremist views, once confined to the darker corners of the web, have seeped into mainstream debate, as documented by Julia Ebner, a researcher at Oxford university and author of Going Mainstream…(More)”