Net zero: the role of consumer behaviour

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Horizon Scan by the UK Parliament: “According to research from the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation, reaching net zero by 2050 will require individual behaviour change, particularly when it comes to aviation, diet and energy use.

The government’s 2023 Powering Up Britain: Net Zero Growth Plan referred to low carbon choices as ‘green choices’, and described them as public and businesses choosing green products, services, and goods. The plan sets out six principles regarding policies to facilitate green choices. Both the Climate Change Committee and the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee have recommended that government strategies should incorporate greater societal and behavioural change policies and guidance.

Contributors to the horizon scan identified managing consumer behaviour and habits to help achieve net zero as a topic of importance for parliament over the next five years. Change in consumer behaviour could result in approximately 60% of required emission reductions to reach net zero.[5] Behaviour change will be needed from the wealthiest in society, who according to Oxfam typically lead higher-carbon lifestyles.

Incorporating behavioural science principles into policy levers is a well-established method of encouraging desired behaviours. Common examples of policies aiming to influence behaviour include subsidies, regulation and information campaigns (see below).

However, others suggest deliberative public engagement approaches, such as the UK Climate Change Assembly,[7] may be needed to determine which pro-environmental policies are acceptable.[8] Repeated public engagement is seen as key to achieve a just transition as different groups will need different support to enable their green choices (PN 706).

Researchers debate the extent to which individuals should be responsible for making green choices as opposed to the regulatory and physical environment facilitating them, or whether markets, businesses and governments should be the main actors responsible for driving action. They highlight the need for different actions based on the context and the different ways individuals act as consumers, citizens, and within organisations and groups. Health, time, comfort and status can strongly influence individual decisions while finance and regulation are typically stronger motivations for organisations (PN 714)…(More)”

It’s just distributed computing: Rethinking AI governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Milton L. Mueller: “What we now lump under the unitary label “artificial intelligence” is not a single technology, but a highly varied set of machine learning applications enabled and supported by a globally ubiquitous system of distributed computing. The paper introduces a 4 part conceptual framework for analyzing the structure of that system, which it labels the digital ecosystem. What we now call “AI” is then shown to be a general functionality of distributed computing. “AI” has been present in primitive forms from the origins of digital computing in the 1950s. Three short case studies show that large-scale machine learning applications have been present in the digital ecosystem ever since the rise of the Internet. and provoked the same public policy concerns that we now associate with “AI.” The governance problems of “AI” are really caused by the development of this digital ecosystem, not by LLMs or other recent applications of machine learning. The paper then examines five recent proposals to “govern AI” and maps them to the constituent elements of the digital ecosystem model. This mapping shows that real-world attempts to assert governance authority over AI capabilities requires systemic control of all four elements of the digital ecosystem: data, computing power, networks and software. “Governing AI,” in other words, means total control of distributed computing. A better alternative is to focus governance and regulation upon specific applications of machine learning. An application-specific approach to governance allows for a more decentralized, freer and more effective method of solving policy conflicts…(More)”

Network architecture for global AI policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Cameron F. Kerry, Joshua P. Meltzer, Andrea Renda, and Andrew W. Wyckoff: “We see efforts to consolidate international AI governance as premature and ill-suited to respond to the immense, complex, novel, challenges of governing advanced AI, and the current diverse and decentralized efforts as beneficial and the best fit for this complex and rapidly developing technology.

Exploring the vast terra incognita of AI, realizing its opportunities, and managing its risks requires governance that can adapt and respond rapidly to AI risks as they emerge, develop deep understanding of the technology and its implications, and mobilize diverse resources and initiatives to address the growing global demand for access to AI. No one government or body will have the capacity to take on these challenges without building multiple coalitions and working closely with experts and institutions in industry, philanthropy, civil society, and the academy.

A distributed network of networks can more effectively address the challenges and opportunities of AI governance than a centralized system. Like the architecture of the interconnected information technology systems on which AI depends, such a decentralized system can bring to bear redundancy, resiliency, and diversity by channeling the functions of AI governance toward the most timely and effective pathways in iterative and diversified processes, providing agility against setbacks or failures at any single point. These multiple centers of effort can harness the benefit of network effects and parallel processing.

We explore this model of distributed and iterative AI governance below…(More)”.

Empowering open data sharing for social good: a privacy-aware approach

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tânia Carvalho et al: “The Covid-19 pandemic has affected the world at multiple levels. Data sharing was pivotal for advancing research to understand the underlying causes and implement effective containment strategies. In response, many countries have facilitated access to daily cases to support research initiatives, fostering collaboration between organisations and making such data available to the public through open data platforms. Despite the several advantages of data sharing, one of the major concerns before releasing health data is its impact on individuals’ privacy. Such a sharing process should adhere to state-of-the-art methods in Data Protection by Design and by Default. In this paper, we use a Covid-19 data set from Portugal’s second-largest hospital to show how it is feasible to ensure data privacy while improving the quality and maintaining the utility of the data. Our goal is to demonstrate how knowledge exchange in multidisciplinary teams of healthcare practitioners, data privacy, and data science experts is crucial to co-developing strategies that ensure high utility in de-identified data…(More).”

How the System Works

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Charles C. Mann: “…We, too, do not have the luxury of ignorance. Our systems serve us well for the most part. But they will need to be revamped for and by the next generation — the generation of the young people at the rehearsal dinner — to accommodate our rising population, technological progress, increasing affluence, and climate change.

The great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work…(More)”.

Citizens’ assemblies in fragile and conflict-affected settings

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Nicole Curato, Lucy J Parry, and Melisa Ross: “Citizens’ assemblies have become a popular form of citizen engagement to address complex issues like climate change, electoral reform, and assisted dying. These assemblies bring together randomly selected citizens to learn about an issue, consider diverse perspectives, and develop collective recommendations. Growing evidence highlights their ability to depolarise views, enhance political efficacy, and rebuild trust in institutions. However, the story of citizens’ assemblies is more complicated on closer look. This demanding form of political participation is increasingly critiqued for its limited impact, susceptibility to elite influence, and rigid design features unsuitable to local contexts. These challenges are especially pronounced in fragile and conflict-affected settings, where trust is low, expectations for action are high, and local ownership is critical. Well-designed assemblies can foster civic trust and dialogue across difference, but poorly implemented ones risk exacerbating tensions.

This article offers a framework to examine citizens’ assemblies in fragile and conflict-affected settings, focusing on three dimensions: deliberative design, deliberative integrity, and deliberative sustainability. We apply this framework to cases in Bosnia and France to illustrate both the transformative potential and the challenges of citizens’ assemblies when held amidst or in the aftermath of political conflict. This article argues that citizens’ assemblies can be vital mechanisms to manage intractable conflict, provided they are designed with intentionality, administered deliberatively, and oriented towards sustainability…(More)”.

So You’ve Decided To Carry Your Brain Around

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Nicholas Clairmont: “If the worry during the Enlightenment, as mathematician Isaac Milner wrote in 1794, was that ‘the great and high’ have ‘forgotten that they have souls,’ then today the worry is that many of us have forgotten that we have bodies.” So writes Christine Rosen, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and senior editor of this journal, in her new book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World.

A sharp articulation of the problem, attributed to Thomas Edison, is that “the chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.” Today, the “brain” can be cast virtually into text or voice communication with just about anyone on Earth, and information and entertainment can be delivered almost immediately to wherever a brain happens to be carried around. But we forget how recently this became possible.

Can it really be less than two decades ago that life started to be revolutionized by the smartphone, the technology that made it possible for people of Edison’s persuasion to render the body seemingly redundant? The iPhone was released in 2007. But even by 2009, according to Pew Research, only a third of American adults “had at some point used the internet on their mobile device.” It wasn’t until 2012 that half did so at least occasionally. And then there is that other technology that took off over the same time period: Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and TikTok and the rest of the social networks that allow us to e-commune and that induce us to see everything we do in light of how it might look to others online.

For such a drastic and recent change, it is one we have largely accepted as just a fact. All the public hand-wringing about it has arguably not made a dent in our actual habits. And maybe that’s because we have underestimated the problem with how it has changed us…(More)”.

Call to make tech firms report data centre energy use as AI booms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Sandra Laville: “Tech companies should be required by law to report the energy and water consumption for their data centres, as the boom in AI risks causing irreparable damage to the environment, experts have said.

AI is growing at a rate unparalleled by other energy systems, bringing heightened environmental risk, a report by the National Engineering Policy Centre (NEPC) said.

The report calls for the UK government to make tech companies submit mandatory reports on their energy and water consumption and carbon emissions in order to set conditions in which data centres are designed to use fewer vital resources…(More)”.

Public Policy Evaluation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

​Implementation Toolkit by the OECD: “…offers practical guidance for government officials and evaluators seeking to improve their evaluation capacities and systems, by enabling a deeper understanding of their strengths and weaknesses and learning from OECD member country experiences and trends. The toolkit supports the practical implementation of the principles contained in the 2022 OECD Recommendation on Public Policy Evaluation, which is the first international standard aimed at driving the establishment of robust institutions and practices that promote the use of public policy evaluations. Together, the Recommendation and this accompanying toolkit seek to help governments build a culture of continuous learning and evidence-informed policymaking, potentially leading to more impactful policies and greater trust in government action.​..(More)”.

The new politics of AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the IPPR: AI is fundamentally different from other technologies – it is set to unleash a vast number of highly sophisticated ‘artificial agents’ into the economy. AI systems that can take actions and make decisions are not just tools – they are actors. This can be a good thing. But it requires a novel type of policymaking and politics. Merely accelerating AI deployment and hoping it will deliver public value will likely be insufficient.

In this briefing, we outline how the summit constitutes the first event of a new era of AI policymaking that links AI policy to delivering public value. We argue that AI needs to be directed towards societies’ goals, via ‘mission-based policies’….(More)”.