Report by the Law Library of Congress: “…provides a list of jurisdictions in the world where legislation that specifically refers to artificial intelligence (AI) or systems utilizing AI have been adopted or proposed. Researchers of the Law Library surveyed all jurisdictions in their research portfolios to find such legislation, and those encountered have been compiled in the annexed list with citations and brief descriptions of the relevant legislation. Only adopted or proposed instruments that have legal effect are reported for national and subnational jurisdictions and the European Union (EU); guidance or policy documents that have no legal effect are not included for these jurisdictions. Major international organizations have also been surveyed and documents adopted or proposed by these organizations that specifically refer to AI are reported in the list…(More)”.
When should states be creative, innovative or entrepreneurial – and when should they not?
Blog by Geoff Mulgan: “…So what about governments being entrepreneurial as opposed to creative and innovative? Here things get even trickier. The classic commentary on the subject was written by the great Jane Jacobs (in her book ‘Systems of Survival’). She pointed out the differences between what she called the ‘guardian syndrome’ and the ‘trader syndrome’. The first is common in governments, the second in business. She argued that all societies have to find a balance between these very different views of the world. The first is concerned with looking after things and protection, originally of land, and can be found in governments, ecological movements as well as aristocracies. The second is concerned with exchange and profit, and is the world of commerce and trade.
These each see the world in very different ways. But in practice they complement each other – indeed their complementarity is what helps societies to function.
In her view, however, fusions of the two tended to be malign pathologies, for example when businesses became like governments, running large areas of territory, or when governments start thinking like traders. Donald Trump was a classic example – who saw the government machine rather as an entrepreneur would see his own business. Silvio Berlusconi was another – a remarkable proportion of his initiatives were essentially designed to promote his businesses, or protect him from prosecution.
Jane Jacobs’ points become very obvious in some industries, like the contemporary digital industries that have become de facto utilities on which we depend every day. It remains far from clear that companies like Meta or Google appreciate that they risk becoming pathological fusions of business and government, without the mindsets appropriate to their new-found power.
The pathologies are also very visible in many parts of the world where the state runs a lot of industry, often with the military playing a leading role. Examples include Pakistan, Myanmar, China and Russia. In these cases public servants really have become entrepreneurs. In some cases – like Huawei – great businesses have been grown. But most of the time such fusions of government and entrepreneurialism tend towards corruption, and predatory extraction of value, because when the state’s monopoly of coercion connects to the power to make money abuses are inevitable.
There may be occasional examples where states should be entrepreneurial at least in mindset – spinning off a function or using some of the ethos of a start-up, for example to create a new digital service. But in such cases very tight rules are vital to avoid abuse, so that if, for example, a part of the state is spun out it doesn’t do so with advantages or easy money or legally guaranteed monopolies or inflated salaries. Much depends on whether you use the word entrepreneurial in a precise sense (the first definition that comes up on Google is: ‘characterized by the taking of financial risks in the hope of profit’) or as a much looser synonym for being innovative or problem-solving…(More)”.
Using Data Science for Improving the Use of Scholarly Research in Public Policy
Blog by Basil Mahfouz: “Scientists worldwide published over 2.6 million papers in 2022 – Almost 5 papers per minute and more than double what they published in the year 2000. Are policy makers making the most of the wealth of available scientific knowledge? In this blog, we describe how we are applying data science methods on the bibliometric database of Elsevier’s International Centre for the Study of Research (ICSR) to analyse how scholarly research is being used by policy makers. More specifically, we will discuss how we are applying natural language processing and network dynamics to identify where there is policy action and also strong evidence; where there is policy interest but a lack of evidence; and where potential policies and strategies are not making full use of available knowledge or tools…(More)”.
Data Is Everybody’s Business
Book by Barbara H. Wixom, Cynthia M. Beath and Leslie Owens: “Most organizations view data monetization—converting data into money—too narrowly: as merely selling data sets. But data monetization is a core business activity for both commercial and noncommercial organizations, and, within organizations, it’s critical to have wide-ranging support for this pursuit. In Data Is Everybody’s Business, the authors offer a clear and engaging way for people across the entire organization to understand data monetization and make it happen. The authors identify three viable ways to convert data into money—improving work with data, wrapping products with data, and selling information offerings—and explain when to pursue each and how to succeed…(More)”.
Guess who’s getting the world’s first self-sovereign national digital ID?
Article by Durga M Sengupta: “Bhutan — a small Himalayan nation with less than 800,000 people — has decided to roll out a national digital identity system for all its citizens. “National digital ID is the platform on which digitization and online services of banks to hospitals to taxation to universities, everything can come online with 100% assurance,” Ujjwal Deep Dahal, CEO of Druk Holding and Investments, the commercial and investment arm of the government which developed the system, told me over a video call from the capital city of Thimphu.
The national ID system has been built using blockchain technology, which will provide each individual a “self-sovereign” identity, meaning it can only be controlled by the citizen and no other entity, similar to how cryptocurrencies work.
The country’s 7-year-old crown prince, Jigme Namgyel Wangchuck, was the first to enroll in the new system, and it is expected to reach the rest of the population within the year, Dahal said.
“Once I’m onboarded, the interesting part about self-sovereign identity is that only I have my verified credentials in my wallet, in my phone. Nobody has access to it thereon but me, not even the government,” he said. The onboarding process takes about 5 seconds, Dahal estimated. “In our system, you will not visit any booth to register yourself. You’ll just download an app; share your details, selfie, and national ID card; and in the back end, the AI algorithm will run and say, ‘Okay, I can give you a verified credential,’” he said. This timeline would differ for people who don’t have smartphones or require assistance.
Druk Holding and Investments has been instrumental in setting up various other parallel projects, including the recently announced Bhutanverse — a metaverse that displays Bhutanese art, architecture, and motifs…(More)”. See also: Field Report: On the Emergent Use of Distributed Ledger Technologies for Identity Management
Interoperability Can Save the Open Web
Interview by Michael Nolan: “In his new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, author Cory Doctorow presents a strong case for disrupting Big Tech. While the dominance of Internet platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Amazon is often taken for granted, Doctorow argues that these walled gardens are fenced in by legal structures, not feats of engineering. Doctorow proposes forcing interoperability—any given platform’s ability to interact with another—as a way to break down those walls and to make the Internet freer and more democratic….
Doctorow: At its root, it’s just the ability to use one thing with something else. Use any ink in your printer with any paper, use any socks with your shoes, anyone’s gasoline in your car, put any lightbulb in your light socket. There’s voluntary, mandatory interoperability, where a group of stakeholders get together and they say, “This is the goal we want all of our products to achieve, and we are going to design a framework so that we can make sure that every lightbulb lights up when you stick it in a light socket.” Then there’s the stuff where they’re indifferent: Car companies don’t stop you from putting a little cigarette-lighter-to-USB adapter into your car.
Companies can grow very quickly because tech has got these great network effects, but they also have, because of interoperability, really low switching costs.—Cory Doctorow
Then there’s the third kind of interop, the kind of chewy, interesting, lots-of-rich-Internet-history interop, which is adversarial interoperability, which in the book we call “comcom,” short for competitive compatibility. It’s the interop that’s done against the wishes of the original equipment manufacturer: scraping, reverse engineering, bots, all of that gnarly stuff done in the face of active hostility. This would be like Apple reverse-engineering Microsoft Office and making the iWork suite—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote—so that anyone with a Mac could read any Windows-based office file without having to buy any software from Microsoft.
There are so many examples of this from technology’s history. It’s really the engine of technology…(More)”.
It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy
Article by the Mozilla Foundation: “Car makers have been bragging about their cars being “computers on wheels” for years to promote their advanced features. However, the conversation about what driving a computer means for its occupants’ privacy hasn’t really caught up. While we worried that our doorbells and watches that connect to the internet might be spying on us, car brands quietly entered the data business by turning their vehicles into powerful data-gobbling machines. Machines that, because of their all those brag-worthy bells and whistles, have an unmatched power to watch, listen, and collect information about what you do and where you go in your car.
All 25 car brands we researched earned our *Privacy Not Included warning label — making cars the official worst category of products for privacy that we have ever reviewed…(More)”.
Incentivising open ecological data using blockchain technology
Paper by Robert John Lewis, Kjell-Erik Marstein & John-Arvid Grytnes: “Mindsets concerning data as proprietary are common, especially where data production is resource intensive. Fears of competing research in concert with loss of exclusivity to hard earned data are pervasive. This is for good reason given that current reward structures in academia focus overwhelmingly on journal prestige and high publication counts, and not accredited publication of open datasets. And, then there exists reluctance of researchers to cede control to centralised repositories, citing concern over the lack of trust and transparency over the way complex data are used and interpreted.
To begin to resolve these cultural and sociological constraints to open data sharing, we as a community must recognise that top-down pressure from policy alone is unlikely to improve the state of ecological data availability and accessibility. Open data policy is almost ubiquitous (e.g. the Joint Data Archiving Policy, (JDAP) http://datadryad.org/pages/jdap) and while cyber-infrastructures are becoming increasingly extensive, most have coevolved with sub-disciplines utilising high velocity, born digital data (e.g. remote sensing, automated sensor networks and citizen science). Consequently, they do not always offer technological solutions that ease data collation, standardisation, management and analytics, nor provide a good fit culturally to research communities working among the long-tail of ecological science, i.e. science conducted by many individual researchers/teams over limited spatial and temporal scales. Given the majority of scientific funding is spent on this type of dispersed research, there is a surprisingly large disconnect between the vast majority of ecological science and the cyber-infrastructures to support open data mandates, offering a possible explanation to why primary ecological data are reportedly difficult to find…(More)”.
On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy
Book by Lee McIntyre: “The effort to destroy facts and make America ungovernable didn’t come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of seventy years of strategic denialism. In On Disinformation, Lee McIntyre shows how the war on facts began, and how ordinary citizens can fight back against the scourge of disinformation that is now threatening the very fabric of our society. Drawing on his twenty years of experience as a scholar of science denial, McIntyre explains how autocrats wield disinformation to manipulate a populace and deny obvious realities, why the best way to combat disinformation is to disrupt its spread, and most importantly, how we can win the war on truth.
McIntyre takes readers through the history of strategic denialism to show how we arrived at this precarious political moment and identifies the creators, amplifiers, and believers of disinformation. Along the way, he also demonstrates how today’s “reality denial” follows the same flawed blueprint of the “five steps of science denial” used by climate deniers and anti-vaxxers; shows how Trump has emulated disinformation tactics created by Russian and Soviet intelligence dating back to the 1920s; provides interviews with leading experts on information warfare, counterterrorism, and political extremism; and spells out the need for algorithmic transparency from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. On Disinformation lays out ten everyday practical steps that we can take as ordinary citizens—from resisting polarization to pressuring our Congresspeople to regulate social media—as well as the important steps our government (if we elect the right leaders) must take.
Compact, easy-to-read (and then pass on to a friend), and never more urgent, On Disinformation does nothing less than empower us with the tools and knowledge needed to save our republic from autocracy before it is too late…(More)”.
The Importance of Purchase to Plate Data
Blog by Andrea Carlson and Thea Palmer Zimmerman: “…Because there can be economic and social barriers to maintaining a healthy diet, USDA promotes Food and Nutrition Security so that everyone has consistent and equitable access to healthy, safe, and affordable foods that promote optimal health and well-being. A set of data tools called the Purchase to Plate Suite (PPS) supports these goals by enabling the update of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP), which estimates how much a budget-conscious family of four needs to spend on groceries to ensure a healthy diet. The TFP market basket – consisting of the specific amounts of various food categories required by the plan – forms the basis of the maximum allotment for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the “Food Stamps” program), which provided financial support towards the cost of groceries for over 41 million individuals in almost 22 million households in fiscal year 2022.
The 2018 Farm Act (Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018) requires that USDA reevaluate the TFP every five years using current food composition, consumption patterns, dietary guidance, and food prices, and using approved scientific methods. USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) was charged with estimating the current food prices using retail food scanner data (Levin et al. 2018; Muth et al. 2016) and utilized the PPS for this task. The most recent TFP update was released in August 2021 and the revised cost of the market basket was the first non-inflation adjustment increase in benefits for SNAP in over 40 years (US Department of Agriculture 2021).
The PPS combines datasets to enhance research related to the economics of food and nutrition. There are four primary components of the suite:
- Purchase to Plate Crosswalk (PPC),
- Purchase to Plate Price Tool (PPPT),
- Purchase to Plate National Average Prices (PP-NAP) for the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), and
- Purchase to Plate Ingredient Tool (PPIT)..(More)”