Artificial intelligence, geopolitics, and information integrity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by John Villasenor: “Much has been written, and rightly so, about the potential that artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to create and promote misinformation. But there is a less well-recognized but equally important application for AI in helping to detect misinformation and limit its spread. This dual role will be particularly important in geopolitics, which is closely tied to how governments shape and react to public opinion both within and beyond their borders. And it is important for another reason as well: While nation-state interest in information is certainly not new, the incorporation of AI into the information ecosystem is set to accelerate as machine learning and related technologies experience continued advances.

The present article explores the intersection of AI and information integrity in the specific context of geopolitics. Before addressing that topic further, it is important to underscore that the geopolitical implications of AI go far beyond information. AI will reshape defense, manufacturing, trade, and many other geopolitically relevant sectors. But information is unique because information flows determine what people know about their own country and the events within it, as well as what they know about events occurring on a global scale. And information flows are also critical inputs to government decisions regarding defense, national security, and the promotion of economic growth. Thus, a full accounting of how AI will influence geopolitics of necessity requires engaging with its application in the information ecosystem.

This article begins with an exploration of some of the key factors that will shape the use of AI in future digital information technologies. It then considers how AI can be applied to both the creation and detection of misinformation. The final section addresses how AI will impact efforts by nation-states to promote–or impede–information integrity….(More)”.

The Information Trade: How Big Tech Conquers Countries, Challenges Our Rights, and Transforms Our World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Alexis Wichowski: “… considers the unchecked rise of tech giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Tesla—what she calls “net states”— and their unavoidable influence in our lives. Rivaling nation states in power and capital, today’s net states are reaching into our physical world, inserting digital services into our lived environments in ways both unseen and, at times, unknown to us. They are transforming the way the world works, putting our rights up for grabs, from personal privacy to national security.  

Combining original reporting and insights drawn from more than 100 interviews with technology and government insiders, including Microsoft president Brad Smith, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the former Federal Trade Commission chair under President Obama, and the managing director of Jigsaw—Google’s Department of Counter-terrorism against extremism and cyber-attacks—The Information Trade explores what happens we give up our personal freedom and individual autonomy in exchange for an easy, plugged-in existence, and shows what we can do to control our relationship with net states before they irreversibly change our future….(More)“

How to use evidence in policymaking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Inês Prates at apolitical: “…Evidence should feed into policymaking; there is no doubt about that. However, the truth is that using evidence in policy is often a very complex process and the stumbling blocks along the way are numerous.

The world has never had a larger wealth of data and information, and that is a great opportunity to open up public debate and democratise access to knowledge. At the same time, however, we are currently living in a “post-truth” era, where personal beliefs can trump scientific knowledge.

Technology and digital platforms have given room for populists to question well-established facts and evidence, and dangerously spread misinformation, while accusing scientists and policymakers of elitism for their own political gain.

Another challenge is that political interests can strategically manipulate or select (“cherry-pick”) evidence that justifies prearranged positions. A stark example of this is the evidence “cherry-picking” done by climate change sceptics who choose restricted time periods (for example of 8 to 12 years) that may not show a global temperature increase.

In addition, to unlock the benefits of evidence informed policy, we need to bridge the “policy-research gap”. Policymakers are not always aware of the latest evidence on an issue. Very often, critical decisions are made under a lot of pressure and the very nature of democracy makes policy complex and messy, making it hard to systematically integrate evidence into the process.

At the same time, researchers may be oblivious to what the most pressing policy challenges are, or how to communicate actionable insights to a non-expert audience. This constructive guide provides tips on how scientists can handle the most challenging aspects of engaging with policymakers.

Institutions like the European Commission’s in-house science service, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) sit precisely at the intersection between science and policy. Researchers from the JRC work together with policymakers on several key policy challenges. A nice example is their work on the scarcity of critical raw materials needed for the EU’s energy transition, using a storytelling tool to raise the awareness of non-experts on an extremely complex issue.

Lastly, we cannot forget about the importance of the buy-in from the public. Although policymakers can willingly ignore or manipulate evidence, they have very little incentives to ignore the will of a critical mass. Let us go back to the climate movement; it is hard to dismiss the influence of the youth-led worldwide protests on world leaders and their climate policy efforts.

Using evidence in policymaking is key to solving the world’s most pressing climate and environmental challenges. To do so effectively, we need to connect and establish trust between government, researchers and the public…(More)”.

10 Privacy Risks and 10 Privacy Enhancing Technologies to Watch in the Next Decade

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Future of Privacy Forum: “Today, FPF is publishing a white paper co-authored by CEO Jules Polonetsky and hackylawyER Founder Elizabeth Renieris to help corporate officers, nonprofit leaders, and policymakers better understand privacy risks that will grow in prominence during the 2020s, as well as rising technologies that will be used to help manage privacy through the decade. Leaders must understand the basics of technologies like biometric scanning, collaborative robotics, and spatial computing in order to assess how existing and proposed policies, systems, and laws will address them, and to support appropriate guidance for the implementation of new digital products and services.

The white paper, Privacy 2020: 10 Privacy Risks and 10 Privacy Enhancing Technologies to Watch in the Next Decade, identifies ten technologies that are likely to create increasingly complex data protection challenges. Over the next decade, privacy considerations will be driven by innovations in tech linked to human bodies, health, and social networks; infrastructure; and computing power. The white paper also highlights ten developments that can enhance privacy – providing cause for optimism that organizations will be able to manage data responsibly. Some of these technologies are already in general use, some will soon be widely deployed, and others are nascent….(More)”.

Are these the 20 top multi-stakeholder processes in 2020 to advance a digital ecosystem for the planet?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by David Jensen, Karen Bakker and Christopher Reimer: “As outlined in our recent article, The promise and peril of a digital ecosystem for the planet, we propose that the ongoing digital revolution needs to be harnessed to drive a transformation towards global sustainability, environmental stewardship, and human well-being. Public, private and civil society actors must take deliberate action and collaborate to build a global digital ecosystem for the planet. A digital ecosystem that mobilizes hardware, software and digital infrastructures together with data analytics to generate dynamic, real-time insights that can power various structural transformations are needed to achieve collective sustainability.

The digital revolution must also be used to abolish extreme poverty and reduce inequalities that jeopardize social cohesion and stability. Often, these social inequalities are tied to and overlap with ecological challenges. Ultimately, then, we must do nothing less than direct the digital revolution for planet, people, prosperity and peace.

To achieve this goal, we must embed the vision of a fair digital ecosystem for the planet into all of the key multi-stakeholder processes that are currently unfolding. We aim to do this through two new articles on Medium: a companion article on Building a digital ecosystem for the planet: 20 substantive priorities for 2020, and this one. In the companion article, we identify three primary engagement tracks: system architecture, applications, and governance. Within these three tracks, we outline 20 priorities for the new decade. Building from these priorities, our focus for this article is to identify a preliminary list of the top 20 most important multi-stakeholder processes that we must engage and influence in 2020….(More).

The Gray Spectrum: Ethical Decision Making with Geospatial and Open Source Analysis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by The Stanley Center for Peace and Security: “Geospatial and open source analysts face decisions in their work that can directly or indirectly cause harm to individuals, organizations, institutions, and society. Though analysts may try to do the right thing, such ethically-informed decisions can be complex. This is particularly true for analysts working on issues related to nuclear nonproliferation or international security, analysts whose decisions on whether to publish certain findings could have far-reaching consequences.

The Stanley Center for Peace and Security and the Open Nuclear Network (ONN) program of One Earth Future Foundation convened a workshop to explore these ethical challenges, identify resources, and consider options for enhancing the ethical practices of geospatial and open source analysis communities.

This Readout & Recommendations brings forward observations from that workshop. It describes ethical challenges that stakeholders from relevant communities face. It concludes with a list of needs participants identified, along with possible strategies for promoting sustaining behaviors that could enhance the ethical conduct of the community of nonproliferation analysts working with geospatial and open source data.

Some Key Findings

  • A code of ethics could serve important functions for the community, including giving moral guidance to practitioners, enhancing public trust in their work, and deterring unethical behavior. Participants in the workshop saw a significant value in such a code and offered ideas for developing one.
  • Awareness of ethical dilemmas and strong ethical reasoning skills are essential for sustaining ethical practices, yet professionals in this field might not have easy access to such training. Several approaches could improve ethics education for the field overall, including starting a body of literature, developing model curricula, and offering training for students and professionals.
  • Other stakeholders—governments, commercial providers, funders, organizations, management teams, etc.—should contribute to the discussion on ethics in the community and reinforce sustaining behaviors….(More)”.

Rheomesa. A New Global System for Catastrophe Prevention, Response & Recovery

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Andrew Doss, Jonas Bedford-Strohm and Leanne Erdberg Steadman: “This paper identifies three structural vacuums in catastrophe governance today that allow for the greatest risks humanity faces to be externalized from decision-making. To mitigate the impact of these risks, The Rheomesa (“fluid table”) provides (1) a deliberative decision-making process between currently siloed entities in various sectors managing the outcome of catastrophes, including government, the private sector, NGOs, IGOs, and hybrid entities, with (2) a prospective, long-term accountability and incentive mechanism that (3) comprehensively addresses the three interdependent tasks societies face surrounding catastrophes – prevention, response, and recovery….(More)”.

An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Niiler at Wired: “On January 9, the World Health Organization notified the public of a flu-like outbreak in China: a cluster of pneumonia cases had been reported in Wuhan, possibly from vendors’ exposure to live animals at the Huanan Seafood Market. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had gotten the word out a few days earlier, on January 6. But a Canadian health monitoring platform had beaten them both to the punch, sending word of the outbreak to its customers on December 31.

BlueDot uses an AI-driven algorithm that scours foreign-language news reports, animal and plant disease networks, and official proclamations to give its clients advance warning to avoid danger zones like Wuhan.

Speed matters during an outbreak, and tight-lipped Chinese officials do not have a good track record of sharing information about diseases, air pollution, or natural disasters. But public health officials at WHO and the CDC have to rely on these very same health officials for their own disease monitoring. So maybe an AI can get there faster. “We know that governments may not be relied upon to provide information in a timely fashion,” says Kamran Khan, BlueDot’s founder and CEO. “We can pick up news of possible outbreaks, little murmurs or forums or blogs of indications of some kind of unusual events going on.”…

The firm isn’t the first to look for an end-run around public health officials, but they are hoping to do better than Google Flu Trends, which was euthanized after underestimating the severity of the 2013 flu season by 140 percent. BlueDot successfully predicted the location of the Zika outbreak in South Florida in a publication in the British medical journal The Lancet….(More)”.

The State of Open Humanitarian Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Centre for Humanitarian Data: “The goal of this report is to increase awareness of the data available for humanitarian response activities and to highlight what is missing, as measured through OCHA’s Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) platform. We want to recognize the valuable and long-standing contributions of data-sharing organizations. We also want to be more targeted in our outreach on what data is required to understand crises so that new actors might be compelled to join the platform. Data is not an end in itself but a critical ingredient to the analysis that informs decision making. With nearly 168 million people in need of humanitarian assistance in 2020 — the highest figure in decades — there is no time, or data, to lose…(More)”.

Data-driven elections

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to Special Issue of Internet Policy Review by Colin J. Bennett and David Lyon: “There is a pervasive assumption that elections can be won and lost on the basis of which candidate or party has the better data on the preferences and behaviour of the electorate. But there are myths and realities about data-driven elections. I

t is time to assess the actual implications of data-driven elections in the light of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, and to reconsider the broader terms of the international debate. Political micro-targeting, and the voter analytics upon which it is based, are essentially forms of surveillance. We know a lot about how surveillance harms democratic values. We know a lot less, however, about how surveillance spreads as a result of democratic practices – by the agents and organisations that encourage us to vote (or not vote).

The articles in this collection, developed out of a workshop hosted by the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia in April 2019, address the most central issues about data-driven elections, and particularly the impact of US social media platforms on local political institutions and cultures. The balance between rights to privacy, and the rights of political actors to communicate with the electorate, is struck in different ways in different jurisdictions depending on a complex interplay of various legal, political, and cultural factors. Collectively, the articles in this collection signal the necessary questions for academics and regulators in the years ahead….(More)”.