Could AI Drive Transformative Social Progress? What Would This Require?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Edward (Ted) A. Parson et al: “In contrast to popular dystopian speculation about the societal impacts of widespread AI deployment, we consider AI’s potential to drive a social transformation toward greater human liberty, agency, and equality. The impact of AI, like all technology, will depend on both properties of the technology and the economic, social, and political conditions of its deployment and use. We identify conditions of each type – technical characteristics and socio-political context – likely to be conducive to such large-scale beneficial impacts.

Promising technical characteristics include decision-making structures that are tentative and pluralistic, rather than optimizing a single-valued objective function under a single characterization of world conditions; and configuring the decision-making of AI-enabled products and services exclusively to advance the interests of their users, subject to relevant social values, not those of their developers or vendors. We explore various strategies and business models for developing and deploying AI-enabled products that incorporate these characteristics, including philanthropic seed capital, crowd-sourcing, open-source development, and sketch various possible ways to scale deployment thereafter….(More)”.

Type, tweet, tap, and pass: How smart city technology is creating a transactional citizen

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Peter A.Johnson, Pamela J.Robinson, andSimonePhilpot: “In the current push for smart city programs around the world, there is a significant focus on enabling transactions between citizen and government. Though traditionally there have always been transactional elements between government and citizen, for example payment of taxes in exchange for services, or voting in exchange for representation, the rise of modern smartphone and smart city technologies have further enabled micro-transactions between citizen, government, and information broker. We conceptualize how the modern smart city, as both envisaged and enacted, incorporates the citizen not necessarily as a whole actor, but as a series of micro-transactions encoded on the real-time landscape of the city. This transactional citizen becomes counted by smart city sensors and integrated into smart city decision-making through the use of certain preferred platforms.

To approach this shift from traditional forms of citizen/city interaction towards micro-transactions, we conceptualize four broad modes of transaction; type (intentional contribution), tweet (intermediated by third party), tap (convened or requested transaction), and pass (ambient transaction based on movement). These four modes are used to frame critical questions of how citizens interact with government in the emerging age of the smart city, and how these interactions impact the relationship between citizen and government, introducing new avenues for private sector influence….(More)”

User Data as Public Resource: Implications for Social Media Regulation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Philip Napoli: “Revelations about the misuse and insecurity of user data gathered by social media platforms have renewed discussions about how best to characterize property rights in user data. At the same time, revelations about the use of social media platforms to disseminate disinformation and hate speech have prompted debates over the need for government regulation to assure that these platforms serve the public interest. These debates often hinge on whether any of the established rationales for media regulation apply to social media. This article argues that the public resource rationale that has been utilized in traditional media regulation in the United States applies to social media.

The public resource rationale contends that, when a media outlet utilizes a public resource—such as the broadcast spectrum, or public rights of way—the outlet must abide by certain public interest obligations that may infringe upon its First Amendment rights. This article argues that aggregate user data can be conceptualized as a public resource that triggers the application of a public interest regulatory framework to social media sites and other digital platforms that derive their revenue from the gathering, sharing, and monetization of massive aggregations of user data….(More)”.

Democratising decisions about technology: a toolkit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The RSA: “As decisions are increasingly automated or made with the help of artificial intelligence, machines are becoming more influential in our lives. These machines are generating a range of predictions, such as the likelihood of a defendant reoffending or the job performance of a candidate based on video interview. In some cases, these predictions could lead to positive outcomes, such as less biased decisions or greater political engagement, but there are also risks that come with ceding power or outsourcing human judgment to a machine.

The RSA’s Forum for Ethical AI ran a citizens’ jury to explore the use of AI in decision-making. We convened participants to grapple with the ethical issues raised by this application of AI under different circumstances and enter into a deliberative dialogue about how companies, organisations, and public institutions should respond.

This report presents a toolkit for organisations seeking to deploy their own ethical processes around the proliferation of AI….(More)”.

Internet of Water

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Water is the essence of life and vital to the well-being of every person, economy, and ecosystem on the planet. But around the globe and here in the United States, water challenges are mounting as climate change, population growth, and other drivers of water stress increase. Many of these challenges are regional in scope and larger than any one organization (or even states), such as the depletion of multi-state aquifers, basin-scale flooding, or the wide-spread accumulation of nutrients leading to dead zones. Much of the infrastructure built to address these problems decades ago, including our data infrastructure, are struggling to meet these challenges. Much of our water data exists in paper formats unique to the organization collecting the data. Often, these organizations existed long before the personal computer was created (1975) or the internet became mainstream (mid 1990’s). As organizations adopted data infrastructure in the late 1990’s, it was with the mindset of “normal infrastructure” at the time. It was built to last for decades, rather than adapt with rapid technological changes. 

New water data infrastructure with new technologies that enable data to flow seamlessly between users and generate information for real-time management are needed to meet our growing water challenges. Decision-makers need accurate, timely data to understand current conditions, identify sustainability problems, illuminate possible solutions, track progress, and adapt along the way. Stakeholders need easy-to-understand metrics of water conditions so they can make sure managers and policymakers protect the environment and the public’s water supplies. The water community needs to continually improve how they manage this complex resource by using data and communicating information to support decision-making. In short, a sustained effort is required to accelerate the development of open data and information systems to support sustainable water resources management. The Internet of Water (IoW) is designed to be just such an effort….(More)”.

To What Extent Does the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Apply to Citizen Scientist-led Health Research with Mobile Devices?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Edward Dove and Jiahong Chen: “In this article, we consider the possible application of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to “citizen scientist”-led health research with mobile devices. We argue that the GDPR likely does cover this activity, depending on the specific context and the territorial scope. Remaining open questions that result from our analysis lead us to call for a lex specialis that would provide greater clarity and certainty regarding the processing of health data for research purposes, including by these non-traditional researchers…(More)”.

Overbooked and Overlooked: Machine Learning and Racial Bias in Medical Appointment Scheduling

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Michele Samorani et al: “Machine learning is often employed in appointment scheduling to identify the patients with the greatest no-show risk, so as to schedule them into overbooked slots, and thereby maximize the clinic performance, as measured by a weighted sum of all patients’ waiting time and the provider’s overtime and idle time. However, if the patients with the greatest no-show risk belong to the same demographic group, then that demographic group will be scheduled in overbooked slots disproportionately to the general population. This is problematic because patients scheduled in those slots tend to have a worse service experience than the other patients, as measured by the time they spend in the waiting room. Such negative experience may decrease patient’s engagement and, in turn, further increase no-shows. Motivated by the real-world case of a large specialty clinic whose black patients have a higher no-show probability than non-black patients, we demonstrate that combining machine learning with scheduling optimization causes racial disparity in terms of patient waiting time. Our solution to eliminate this disparity while maintaining the benefits derived from machine learning consists of explicitly including the objective of minimizing racial disparity. We validate our solution method both on simulated data and real-world data, and find that racial disparity can be completely eliminated with no significant increase in scheduling cost when compared to the traditional predictive overbooking framework….(More)”.

Communal Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A Talk By Seth Lloyd at The Edge: “We haven’t talked about the socialization of intelligence very much. We talked a lot about intelligence as being individual human things, yet the thing that distinguishes humans from other animals is our possession of human language, which allows us both to think and communicate in ways that other animals don’t appear to be able to. This gives us a cooperative power as a global organism, which is causing lots of trouble. If I were another species, I’d be pretty damn pissed off right now. What makes human beings effective is not their individual intelligences, though there are many very intelligent people in this room, but their communal intelligence….(More)”.

Handbook of Research on Politics in the Computer Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Ashu M. G. Solo: “Technology and particularly the Internet have caused many changes in the realm of politics. Aspects of engineering, computer science, mathematics, or natural science can be applied to politics. Politicians and candidates use their own websites and social network profiles to get their message out. Revolutions in many countries in the Middle East and North Africa have started in large part due to social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Social networking has also played a role in protests and riots in numerous countries. The mainstream media no longer has a monopoly on political commentary as anybody can set up a blog or post a video online. Now, political activists can network together online.

The Handbook of Research on Politics in the Computer Age is a pivotal reference source that serves to increase the understanding of methods for politics in the computer age, the effectiveness of these methods, and tools for analyzing these methods. The book includes research chapters on different aspects of politics with information technology, engineering, computer science, or math, from 27 researchers at 20 universities and research organizations in Belgium, Brazil, Cape Verde, Egypt, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Portugal, and the United States of America. Highlighting topics such as online campaigning and fake news, the prospective audience includes, but is not limited to, researchers, political and public policy analysts, political scientists, engineers, computer scientists, political campaign managers and staff, politicians and their staff, political operatives, professors, students, and individuals working in the fields of politics, e-politics, e-government, new media and communication studies, and Internet marketing….(More)”.

Artificial Discretion as a Tool of Governance: A Framework for Understanding the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Public Administration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Matthew M Young, Justin B Bullock, and Jesse D Lecy in Perspectives on Public Management and Governance: “Public administration research has documented a shift in the locus of discretion away from street-level bureaucrats to “systems-level bureaucracies” as a result of new information communication technologies that automate bureaucratic processes, and thus shape access to resources and decisions around enforcement and punishment. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are accelerating these trends, potentially altering discretion in public management in exciting and in challenging ways. We introduce the concept of “artificial discretion” as a theoretical framework to help public managers consider the impact of AI as they face decisions about whether and how to implement it. We operationalize discretion as the execution of tasks that require nontrivial decisions. Using Salamon’s tools of governance framework, we compare artificial discretion to human discretion as task specificity and environmental complexity vary. We evaluate artificial discretion with the criteria of effectiveness, efficiency, equity, manageability, and political feasibility. Our analysis suggests three principal ways that artificial discretion can improve administrative discretion at the task level: (1) increasing scalability, (2) decreasing cost, and (3) improving quality. At the same time, artificial discretion raises serious concerns with respect to equity, manageability, and political feasibility….(More)”.