Report by the UK Financial Conduct Authority: “Big Tech firms in the UK and around the world have been, and continue to be, under active scrutiny by competition and regulatory authorities. This is because some of these large technology firms may have both the ability and the incentive to shape digital markets by protecting existing market power and extending it into new markets.
Concentration in some digital markets, and Big Tech firms’ key role, has been widely discussed, including in our DP22/05. This reflects both the characteristics of digital markets and the characteristics and behaviours of Big Tech firms themselves. Although Big Tech firms have different business models, common characteristics include their global scale and access to a large installed user base, rich data about their users, advanced data analytics and technology, influence over decision making and defaults, ecosystems of complementary products and strategic behaviours, including acquisition strategies.
Through our work, we aim to mitigate the risk of competition in retail financial markets evolving in a way that results in some Big Tech firms gaining entrenched market power, as seen in other sectors and jurisdictions, while enabling the potential competition benefits that come from Big Tech firms providing challenge to incumbent financial services firms…(More)”.
Russia Clones Wikipedia, Censors It, Bans Original
Article by Jules Roscoe: “Russia has replaced Wikipedia with a state-sponsored encyclopedia that is a clone of the original Russian Wikipedia but which conveniently has been edited to omit things that could cast the Russian government in poor light. Real Russian Wikipedia editors used to refer to the real Wikipedia as Ruwiki; the new one is called Ruviki, has “ruwiki” in its url, and has copied all Russian-language Wikipedia articles and strictly edited them to comply with Russian laws.
The new articles exclude mentions of “foreign agents,” the Russian government’s designation for any person or entity which expresses opinions about the government and is supported, financially or otherwise, by an outside nation. Prominent “foreign agents” have included a foundation created by Alexei Navalny, a famed Russian opposition leader who died in prison in February, and Memorial, an organization dedicated to preserving the memory of Soviet terror victims, which was liquidated in 2022. The news was first reported by Novaya Gazeta, an independent Russian news outlet that relocated to Latvia after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. It was also picked up by Signpost, a publication that follows Wikimedia goings-on.
Both Ruviki articles about these agents include disclaimers about their status as foreign agents. Navalny’s article states he is a “video blogger” known for “involvement in extremist activity or terrorism.” It is worth mentioning that his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, firmly believes he was killed. …(More)”.
The Crime Data Handbook
Book edited by Laura Huey and David Buil-Gil: “Crime research has grown substantially over the past decade, with a rise in evidence-informed approaches to criminal justice, statistics-driven decision-making and predictive analytics. The fuel that has driven this growth is data – and one of its most pressing challenges is the lack of research on the use and interpretation of data sources.
This accessible, engaging book closes that gap for researchers, practitioners and students. International researchers and crime analysts discuss the strengths, perils and opportunities of the data sources and tools now available and their best use in informing sound public policy and criminal justice practice…(More)”.
AI chatbots refuse to produce ‘controversial’ output − why that’s a free speech problem
Article by Jordi Calvet-Bademunt and Jacob Mchangama: “Google recently made headlines globally because its chatbot Gemini generated images of people of color instead of white people in historical settings that featured white people. Adobe Firefly’s image creation tool saw similar issues. This led some commentators to complain that AI had gone “woke.” Others suggested these issues resulted from faulty efforts to fight AI bias and better serve a global audience.
The discussions over AI’s political leanings and efforts to fight bias are important. Still, the conversation on AI ignores another crucial issue: What is the AI industry’s approach to free speech, and does it embrace international free speech standards?…In a recent report, we found that generative AI has important shortcomings regarding freedom of expression and access to information.
Generative AI is a type of AI that creates content, like text or images, based on the data it has been trained with. In particular, we found that the use policies of major chatbots do not meet United Nations standards. In practice, this means that AI chatbots often censor output when dealing with issues the companies deem controversial. Without a solid culture of free speech, the companies producing generative AI tools are likely to continue to face backlash in these increasingly polarized times…(More)”.
‘Eugenics on steroids’: the toxic and contested legacy of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute
Article by Andrew Anthony: “Two weeks ago it was quietly announced that the Future of Humanity Institute, the renowned multidisciplinary research centre in Oxford, no longer had a future. It shut down without warning on 16 April. Initially there was just a brief statement on its website stating it had closed and that its research may continue elsewhere within and outside the university.
The institute, which was dedicated to studying existential risks to humanity, was founded in 2005 by the Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom and quickly made a name for itself beyond academic circles – particularly in Silicon Valley, where a number of tech billionaires sang its praises and provided financial support.
Bostrom is perhaps best known for his bestselling 2014 book Superintelligence, which warned of the existential dangers of artificial intelligence, but he also gained widespread recognition for his 2003 academic paper “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”. The paper argued that over time humans were likely to develop the ability to make simulations that were indistinguishable from reality, and if this was the case, it was possible that it had already happened and that we are the simulations….
Among the other ideas and movements that have emerged from the FHI are longtermism – the notion that humanity should prioritise the needs of the distant future because it theoretically contains hugely more lives than the present – and effective altruism (EA), a utilitarian approach to maximising global good.
These philosophies, which have intermarried, inspired something of a cult-like following,…
Torres has come to believe that the work of the FHI and its offshoots amounts to what they call a “noxious ideology” and “eugenics on steroids”. They refuse to see Bostrom’s 1996 comments as poorly worded juvenilia, but indicative of a brutal utilitarian view of humanity. Torres notes that six years after the email thread, Bostrom wrote a paper on existential risk that helped launch the longtermist movement, in which he discusses “dysgenic pressures” – dysgenic is the opposite of eugenic. Bostrom wrote:
“Currently it seems that there is a negative correlation in some places between intellectual achievement and fertility. If such selection were to operate over a long period of time, we might evolve into a less brainy but more fertile species, homo philoprogenitus (‘lover of many offspring’).”…(More)”.
AI-Powered World Health Chatbot Is Flubbing Some Answers
Article by Jessica Nix: “The World Health Organization is wading into the world of AI to provide basic health information through a human-like avatar. But while the bot responds sympathetically to users’ facial expressions, it doesn’t always know what it’s talking about.
SARAH, short for Smart AI Resource Assistant for Health, is a virtual health worker that’s available to talk 24/7 in eight different languages to explain topics like mental health, tobacco use and healthy eating. It’s part of the WHO’s campaign to find technology that can both educate people and fill staffing gaps with the world facing a health-care worker shortage.
WHO warns on its website that this early prototype, introduced on April 2, provides responses that “may not always be accurate.” Some of SARAH’s AI training is years behind the latest data. And the bot occasionally provides bizarre answers, known as hallucinations in AI models, that can spread misinformation about public health.The WHO’s artificial intelligence tool provides public health information via a lifelike avatar.Source: Bloomberg
SARAH doesn’t have a diagnostic feature like WebMD or Google. In fact, the bot is programmed to not talk about anything outside of the WHO’s purview, including questions on specific drugs. So SARAH often sends people to a WHO website or says that users should “consult with your health-care provider.”
“It lacks depth,” Ramin Javan, a radiologist and researcher at George Washington University, said. “But I think it’s because they just don’t want to overstep their boundaries and this is just the first step.”..(More)”
What can improve democracy?
Report by the Pew Research Center: “…surveys have long found that people in many countries are dissatisfied with their democracy and want major changes to their political systems – and this year is no exception. But high and growing rates of discontent certainly raise the question: What do people think could fix things?
We set out to answer this by asking more than 30,000 respondents in 24 countries an open-ended question: “What do you think would help improve the way democracy in your country is working?” While the second- and third-most mentioned priorities vary greatly, across most countries surveyed, there is one clear top answer: Democracy can be improved with better or different politicians.
People want politicians who are more responsive to their needs and who are more competent and honest, among other factors. People also focus on questions of descriptive representation – the importance of having politicians with certain characteristics such as a specific race, religion or gender.
Respondents also think citizens can improve their own democracy. Across most of the 24 countries surveyed, issues of public participation and of different behavior from the people themselves are a top-five priority.
Other topics that come up regularly include:
- Economic reform, especially reforms that will enhance job creation.
- Government reform, including implementing term limits, adjusting the balance of power between institutions and other factors.
We explore these topics and the others we coded in the following chapters:
- Politicians, changing leadership and political parties (Chapter 1)
- Government reform, special interests and the media (Chapter 2)
- Economic and policy changes (Chapter 3)
- Citizen behavior and individual rights and equality (Chapter 4)
- Electoral reform and direct democracy (Chapter 5)
- Rule of law, safety and the judicial system (Chapter 6)…(More)”.
Using Artificial Intelligence to Map the Earth’s Forests
Article from Meta and World Resources Institute: “Forests harbor most of Earth’s terrestrial biodiversity and play a critical role in the uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Ecosystem services provided by forests underpin an essential defense against the climate and biodiversity crises. However, critical gaps remain in the scientific understanding of the structure and extent of global forests. Because the vast majority of existing data on global forests is derived from low to medium resolution satellite imagery (10 or 30 meters), there is a gap in the scientific understanding of dynamic and more dispersed forest systems such as agroforestry, drylands forests, and alpine forests, which together constitute more than a third of the world’s forests.
Today, Meta and World Resources Institute are launching a global map of tree canopy height at a 1-meter resolution, allowing the detection of single trees at a global scale. In an effort to advance open source forest monitoring, all canopy height data and artificial intelligence models are free and publicly available…(More)”.
Social Choice for AI Alignment: Dealing with Diverse Human Feedback
Paper by Vincent Conitzer, et al: “Foundation models such as GPT-4 are fine-tuned to avoid unsafe or otherwise problematic behavior, so that, for example, they refuse to comply with requests for help with committing crimes or with producing racist text. One approach to fine-tuning, called reinforcement learning from human feedback, learns from humans’ expressed preferences over multiple outputs. Another approach is constitutional AI, in which the input from humans is a list of high-level principles. But how do we deal with potentially diverging input from humans? How can we aggregate the input into consistent data about ”collective” preferences or otherwise use it to make collective choices about model behavior? In this paper, we argue that the field of social choice is well positioned to address these questions…(More)”.
We Need To Rewild The Internet
Article by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon: “In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern state, they were simply a source of timber.
So-called “scientific forestry” was that century’s growth hacking. It made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. They were replaced with lower-skilled laborers following basic algorithmic instructions to keep the monocrop tidy, the understory bare.
Information and decision-making power now flowed straight to the top. Decades later when the first crop was felled, vast fortunes were made, tree by standardized tree. The clear-felled forests were replanted, with hopes of extending the boom. Readers of the American political anthropologist of anarchy and order, James C. Scott, know what happened next.
It was a disaster so bad that a new word, Waldsterben, or “forest death,” was minted to describe the result. All the same species and age, the trees were flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease — even the survivors were spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare, they were all but dead. The first magnificent bounty had not been the beginning of endless riches, but a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been slaughtered…(More)”.