Technology and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Speech by Antony J. Blinken: “Today’s revolutions in technology are at the heart of our competition with geopolitical rivals. They pose a real test to our security. And they also represent an engine of historic possibility – for our economies, for our democracies, for our people, for our planet.

Put another way: Security, stability, prosperity – they are no longer solely analog matters.

The test before us is whether we can harness the power of this era of disruption and channel it into greater stability, greater prosperity, greater opportunity.

President Biden is determined not just to pass this “tech test,” but to ace it.

Our ability to design, to develop, to deploy technologies will determine our capacity to shape the tech future. And naturally, operating from a position of strength better positions us to set standards and advance norms around the world.

But our advantage comes not just from our domestic strength.

It comes from our solidarity with the majority of the world that shares our vision for a vibrant, open, and secure technological future, and from an unmatched network of allies and partners with whom we can work in common cause to pass the “tech test.”

We’re committed not to “digital sovereignty” but “digital solidarity.”

On May 6, the State Department unveiled the U.S. International Cyberspace and Digital Strategy, which treats digital solidarity as our North Star. Solidarity informs our approach not only to digital technologies, but to all key foundational technologies.

So what I’d like to do now is share with you five ways that we’re putting this into practice.

First, we’re harnessing technology for the betterment not just of our people and our friends, but of all humanity.

The United States believes emerging and foundational technologies can and should be used to drive development and prosperity, to promote respect for human rights, to solve shared global challenges.

Some of our strategic rivals are working toward a very different goal. They’re using digital technologies and genomic data collection to surveil their people, to repress human rights.

Pretty much everywhere I go, I hear from government officials and citizens alike about their concerns about these dystopian uses of technology. And I also hear an abiding commitment to our affirmative vision and to the embrace of technology as a pathway to modernization and opportunity.

Our job is to use diplomacy to try to grow this consensus even further – to internationalize and institutionalize our vision of “tech for good.”..(More)”.

Supercharging Research: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence to Meet Global Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST): “Broadly speaking, scientific advances have historically proceeded via a combination of three paradigms: empirical studies and experimentation; scientific theory and mathematical analyses; and numerical experiments and modeling. In recent years a fourth paradigm, data-driven discovery, has emerged.

These four paradigms complement and support each other. However, all four scientific modalities experience impediments to progress. Verification of a scientific hypothesis through experimentation, careful observation, or via clinical trial can be slow and expensive. The range of candidate theories to consider can be too vast and complex for human scientists to analyze. Truly innovative new hypotheses might only be discovered by fortuitous chance, or by exceptionally insightful researchers. Numerical models can be inaccurate or require enormous amounts of computational resources. Data sets can be incomplete, biased, heterogeneous, or noisy to analyze using traditional data science methods.

AI tools have obvious applications in data-driven science, but it has also been a long-standing aspiration to use these technologies to remove, or at least reduce, many of the obstacles encountered in the other three paradigms. With the current advances in AI, this dream is on the cusp of becoming a reality: candidate solutions to scientific problems are being rapidly identified, complex simulations are being enriched, and robust new ways of analyzing data are being developed.

By combining AI with the other three research modes, the rate of scientific progress will be greatly accelerated, and researchers will be positioned to meet urgent global challenges in a timely manner. Like most technologies, AI is dual use: AI technology can facilitate both beneficial and harmful applications and can cause unintended negative consequences if deployed irresponsibly or without expert and ethical human supervision. Nevertheless, PCAST sees great potential for advances in AI to accelerate science and technology for the benefit of society and the planet. In this report, we provide a high-level vision for how AI, if used responsibly, can transform the way that science is done, expand the boundaries of human knowledge, and enable researchers to find solutions to some of society’s most pressing problems…(More)”

Complexity and the Global Governance of AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Gordon LaForge et al: “In the coming years, advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems are expected to bring significant benefits and risks for humanity. Many governments, companies, researchers, and civil society organizations are proposing, and in some cases, building global governance frameworks and institutions to promote AI safety and beneficial development. Complexity thinking, a way of viewing the world not just as discrete parts at the macro level but also in terms of bottom-up and interactive complex adaptive systems, can be a useful intellectual and scientific lens for shaping these endeavors. This paper details how insights from the science and theory of complexity can aid understanding of the challenges posed by AI and its potential impacts on society. Given the characteristics of complex adaptive systems, the paper recommends that global AI governance be based on providing a fit, adaptive response system that mitigates harmful outcomes of AI and enables positive aspects to flourish. The paper proposes components of such a system in three areas: access and power, international relations and global stability; and accountability and liability…(More)”

Disfactory Project: How to Detect Illegal Factories by Open Source Technology and Crowdsourcing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Peii Lai: “…building illegal factories on farmlands is still a profitable business, because the factory owners thus obtain the means of production at a lower price and can easily get away with penalties by simply ignoring their legal responsibility. Such conduct simply shifts the cost of production onto the environment in an irresponsible way. As we can imagine, such violations has been increasing year by year. On average, Taiwan loses 1,500 hectares of farmland each year due to illegal use, which demonstrates that illegal factories are an ongoing and escalating problem that people cannot ignore.

It’s clearly that the problem of illegal factories are caused by dysfunction of the previous land management regulations. In response to that, Citizens of Earth Taiwan (CET) started seeking solutions to tackle the illegal factories. CET soon realized that the biggest obstacle they faced was that no one saw the violations as a big deal. Local governments avoided standing on the opposite side of the illegal factories. For local governments, imposing penalties is an arduous and thankless task…

Through the collaboration of CET and g0v-zero, the Disfactory project combines the knowledge they have accumulated through advocacy and the diverse techniques brought by the passionate civic contributors. In 2020, the Disfactory project team delivered its first product: disfactory.tw. They built a website with geographic information that whistle blowers can operate on the ground by themselves. Through a few simple steps: identifying the location of the target illegal factory, taking a picture of it, uploading the photos, any citizen can easily register the information on Disfactory’s website….(More)”

‘Positive deviance’ and the power of outliers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bloomberg Cities Network: “Groundbreaking solutions in cities are often the result of visionary mayoral leadership. But sometimes certain communities achieve significantly better outcomes than their similarly resourced neighbors—and the underlying reasons may not be immediately obvious to local leaders. Ravi Gurumurthy, CEO of the global innovation foundation Nesta, believes that this variation in quality of life at a hyper-local level is something worth paying a lot more attention to. 

“The fastest way for us to improve people’s lives will be to mine that variation and really understand what is going on,” he says.    

This concept, known as “positive deviance,” describes individuals or communities that achieve remarkable success or exhibit highly effective behaviors despite facing the same constraints as their peers. With a long history of use in international development, positive deviance is now gaining traction among city leaders as a source of solutions to stubborn urban challenges.  

Here’s a closer look at what it’s about, and how it’s already being used to uplift promising approaches in cities. 

What is positive deviance? 

Positive deviance first gained widespread attention because of a remarkable success story in 1990s Vietnam. Much of the country was suffering from a malnutrition crisis, and efforts to design and implement new solutions were coming up short. But aid workers landed on a breakthrough by paying closer attention to children who already appeared larger and healthier than their peers.  

It turned out these children were being fed different diets—leaning more heavily on shrimp and crab, for example, which were widely accessible but less often fed to young people. These children also were being fed more frequently, in smaller meals, throughout the day—an intervention that, again, did not require parents to have more resources so much as to differently use what was universally available.  

When these practices—feeding kids shellfish and making meals smaller and more frequent—were replicated, malnutrition plummeted…(More)”

The Battle for Attention

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Nathan Heller: “…For years, we have heard a litany of reasons why our capacity to pay attention is disturbingly on the wane. Technology—the buzzing, blinking pageant on our screens and in our pockets—hounds us. Modern life, forever quicker and more scattered, drives concentration away. For just as long, concerns of this variety could be put aside. Television was described as a force against attention even in the nineteen-forties. A lot of focussed, worthwhile work has taken place since then.

But alarms of late have grown more urgent. Last year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported a huge ten-year decline in reading, math, and science performance among fifteen-year-olds globally, a third of whom cited digital distraction as an issue. Clinical presentations of attention problems have climbed (a recent study of data from the medical-software company Epic found an over-all tripling of A.D.H.D. diagnoses between 2010 and 2022, with the steepest uptick among elementary-school-age children), and college students increasingly struggle to get through books, according to their teachers, many of whom confess to feeling the same way. Film pacing has accelerated, with the average length of a shot decreasing; in music, the mean length of top-performing pop songs declined by more than a minute between 1990 and 2020. A study conducted in 2004 by the psychologist Gloria Mark found that participants kept their attention on a single screen for an average of two and a half minutes before turning it elsewhere. These days, she writes, people can pay attention to one screen for an average of only forty-seven seconds.

“Attention as a category isn’t that salient for younger folks,” Jac Mullen, a writer and a high-school teacher in New Haven, told me recently. “It takes a lot to show that how you pay attention affects the outcome—that if you focus your attention on one thing, rather than dispersing it across many things, the one thing you think is hard will become easier—but that’s a level of instruction I often find myself giving.” It’s not the students’ fault, he thinks; multitasking and its euphemism, “time management,” have become goals across the pedagogic field. The SAT was redesigned this spring to be forty-five minutes shorter, with many reading-comprehension passages trimmed to two or three sentences. Some Ivy League professors report being counselled to switch up what they’re doing every ten minutes or so to avoid falling behind their students’ churn. What appears at first to be a crisis of attention may be a narrowing of the way we interpret its value: an emergency about where—and with what goal—we look.

“In many ways, it’s the oldest question in advertising: how to get attention,” an executive named Joanne Leong told me one afternoon, in a conference room on the thirteenth floor of the midtown office of the Dentsu agency. We were speaking about a new attention market. Slides were projected on the wall, and bits of conversation rattled like half-melted ice cubes in the corridor outside. For decades, what was going on between an advertisement and its viewers was unclear: there was no consensus about what attention was or how to quantify it. “The difference now is that there’s better tech to measure it,” Leong said…(More)”.

Digital ethnography: A qualitative approach to digital cultures, spaces, and socialites

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Coppélie Cocq and Evelina Liliequist: “This paper introduces principles for the application and challenges of small data ethnography in digital research. It discusses the need to incorporate ethics in every step of the research process. As teachers and researchers within the digital humanities, we argue for the value of a qualitative approach to digital contents, spaces, and phenomena. This article is relevant as a guide for students and researchers whose studies examine digital practices, phenomena, and social communities that occur in, through, or in relation to digital contexts…(More)”. See also: Digital Ethnography Data Innovation Primer.

The case for global governance of AI: arguments, counter-arguments, and challenges ahead

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mark Coeckelbergh: “But why, exactly, is global governance needed, and what form can and should it take? The main argument for the global governance of AI, which is also applicable to digital technologies in general, is essentially a moral one: as AI technologies become increasingly powerful and influential, we have the moral responsibility to ensure that it benefits humanity as a whole and that we deal with the global risks and the ethical and societal issues that arise from the technology, including privacy issues, security and military uses, bias and fairness, responsibility attribution, transparency, job displacement, safety, manipulation, and AI’s environmental impact. Since the effects of AI cross borders, so the argument continues, global cooperation and global governance are the only means to fully and effectively exercise that moral responsibility and ensure responsible innovation and use of technology to increase the well-being for all and preserve peace; national regulation is not sufficient….(More)”.

Repository of 80+ real-life examples of how to anticipate migration using innovative forecast and foresight methods is now LIVE!

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Launch! Repository of 80+ real-life examples of how to anticipate migration using innovative forecast and foresight methods is now LIVE!

BD4M Announcement: “Today, we are excited to launch the Big Data For Migration Alliance (BD4M) Repository of Use Cases for Anticipating Migration Policy! The repository is a curated collection of real-world applications of anticipatory methods in migration policy. Here, policymakers, researchers, and practitioners can find a wealth of examples demonstrating how foresight, forecast and other anticipatory approaches are applied to anticipating migration for policy making. 

Migration policy is a multifaceted and constantly evolving field, shaped by a wide variety of factors such as economic conditions, geopolitical shifts or climate emergencies. Anticipatory methods are essential to help policymakers proactively respond to emerging trends and potential challenges. By using anticipatory tools, migration policy makers can draw from both quantitative and qualitative data to obtain valuable insights for their specific goals. The Big Data for Migration Alliance — a join effort of The GovLab, the International Organization for Migration and the European Union Joint Research Centre that seeks to improve the evidence base on migration and human mobility — recognizes the importance of the role of anticipatory tools and has worked on the creation of a repository of use cases that showcases the current use landscape of anticipatory tools in migration policy making around the world. This repository aims to provide policymakers, researchers and practitioners with applied examples that can inform their strategies and ultimately contribute to the improvement of migration policies around the world. 

As part of our work on exploring innovative anticipatory methods for migration policy, throughout the year we have published a Blog Series that delved into various aspects of the use of anticipatory methods, exploring their value and challenges, proposing a taxonomy, and exploring practical applications…(More)”.

The limits of state AI legislation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Derek Robertson: “When it comes to regulating artificial intelligence, the action right now is in the states, not Washington.

State legislatures are often, like their counterparts in Europe, contrasted favorably with Congress — willing to take action where their politically paralyzed federal counterpart can’t, or won’t. Right now, every state except Alabama and Wyoming is considering some kind of AI legislation.

But simply acting doesn’t guarantee the best outcome. And today, two consumer advocates warn in POLITICO Magazine that most, if not all, state laws are overlooking crucial loopholes that could shield companies from liability when it comes to harm caused by AI decisions — or from simply being forced to disclose when it’s used in the first place.

Grace Gedye, an AI-focused policy analyst at Consumer Reports, and Matt Scherer, senior policy counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology, write in an op-ed that while the use of AI systems by employers is screaming out for regulation, many of the efforts in the states are ineffectual at best.

Under the most important state laws now in consideration, they write, “Job applicants, patients, renters and consumers would still have a hard time finding out if discriminatory or error-prone AI was used to help make life-altering decisions about them.”

Transparency around how and when AI systems are deployed — whether in the public or private sector — is a key concern of the growing industry’s watchdogs. The Netherlands’ tax authority infamously immiserated tens of thousands of families by accusing them falsely of child care benefits fraud after an algorithm used to detect it went awry…

One issue: a series of jargon-filled loopholes in many bill texts that says the laws only cover systems “specifically developed” to be “controlling” or “substantial” factors in decision-making.

“Cutting through the jargon, this would mean that companies could completely evade the law simply by putting fine print at the bottom of their technical documentation or marketing materials saying that their product wasn’t designed to be the main reason for a decision and should only be used under human supervision,” they explain…(More)”