Report by Access Now: “People experiencing vulnerability as a consequence of conflict and violence often rely on a small group of humanitarian actors, trusted because of their claims of neutrality, impartiality, and independence from the warring parties. They rely on these humanitarian organisations and agencies for subsistence, protection, and access to basic services and information, in the darkest times in their lives. Yet these same actors can expose them to further harm. Our new report, Mapping Humanitarian Tech: exposing protection gaps in digital transformation programmes, examines the partnerships between humanitarian actors and private corporations. Our aim is to show how these often-opaque partnerships impact the digital rights of the affected communities, and to offer recommendations for keeping people safe…(More)”.
Manipulation by design
Article by Jan Trzaskowski: “Human behaviour is affected by architecture, including how online user interfaces are designed. The purpose of this article is to provide insights into the regulation of behaviour modification by the design of choice architecture in light of the European Union data protection law (GDPR) and marketing law (UCPD). It has become popular to use the term ‘dark pattern’ (also ‘deceptive practices’) to describe such practices in online environments. The term provides a framework for identifying and discussing ‘problematic’ design practices, but the definitions and descriptions are not sufficient in themselves to draw the fine line between legitimate (lawful) persuasion and unlawful manipulation, which requires an inquiry into agency, self-determination, regulation and legal interpretation. The main contribution of this article is to place manipulative design, including ‘dark patterns’, within the framework of persuasion (marketing), technology (persuasive technology) and law (privacy and marketing)…(More)”.
The Digital Double Bind: Change and Stasis in the Middle East
Book by Mohamed Zayani and Joe F. Khalil: “The digital has emerged as a driving force of change that is reshaping everyday life and affecting nearly every sphere of vital activity. Yet, its impact has been far from uniform. The multifaceted implications of these ongoing shifts differ markedly across the world, demanding a nuanced understanding of specific manifestations and local experiences of the digital.
In The Digital Double Bind, Mohamed Zayani and Joe F. Khalil explore how the Middle East’s digital turn intersects with complex political, economic, and socio-cultural dynamics. Drawing on local research and rich case studies, they show how the same forces that brought promises of change through digital transformation have also engendered tensions and contradictions. The authors contend that the ensuing disjunctures have ensnared the region in a double bind, which represents the salient feature of an unfolding digital turn. The same conditions that drive the state, market, and public immersion in the digital also inhibit the region’s drive to change.
The Digital Double Bind reconsiders the question of technology and change, moving beyond binary formulations and familiar trajectories of the network society. It offers a path-breaking analysis of change and stasis in the Middle East and provides a roadmap for a critical engagement with digitality in the Global South…(More)”.
Handbook of Artificial Intelligence at Work
Book edited by Martha Garcia-Murillo and Andrea Renda: “With the advancement in processing power and storage now enabling algorithms to expand their capabilities beyond their initial narrow applications, technology is becoming increasingly powerful. This highly topical Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on work, assessing its effect on an array of economic sectors, the resulting nature of work, and the subsequent policy implications of these changes.
Featuring contributions from leading experts across diverse fields, the Handbook of Artificial Intelligence at Work takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding AI’s connections to existing economic, social, and political ecosystems. Considering a range of fields including agriculture, manufacturing, health care, education, law and government, the Handbook provides detailed sector-specific analyses of how AI is changing the nature of work, the challenges it presents and the opportunities it creates. Looking forward, it makes policy recommendations to address concerns, such as the potential displacement of some human labor by AI and growth in inequality affecting those lacking the necessary skills to interact with these technologies or without opportunities to do so.
This vital Handbook is an essential read for students and academics in the fields of business and management, information technology, AI, and public policy. It will also be highly informative from a cross-disciplinary perspective for practitioners, as well as policy makers with an interest in the development of AI technology…(More)”
Data Science, AI and Data Philanthropy in Foundations : On the Path to Maturity
Report by Filippo Candela, Sevda Kilicalp, and Daniel Spiers: “This research explores the data-related initiatives currently undertaken by a pool of foundations from across Europe. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that has investigated the level of data work within philanthropic foundations, even though the rise of data and its importance has increasingly been recognised in the non-profit sector. Given that this is an inaugural piece of research, the study takes an exploratory approach, prioritising a comprehensive survey of data practices foundations are currently implementing or exploring. The goal was to obtain a snapshot of the current level of maturity and commitment of foundations regarding data-related matters…(More)”
How Health Data Integrity Can Earn Trust and Advance Health
Article by Jochen Lennerz, Nick Schneider and Karl Lauterbach: “Efforts to share health data across borders snag on legal and regulatory barriers. Before detangling the fine print, let’s agree on overarching principles.
Imagine a scenario in which Mary, an individual with a rare disease, has agreed to share her medical records for a research project aimed at finding better treatments for genetic disorders. Mary’s consent is grounded in trust that her data will be handled with the utmost care, protected from unauthorized access, and used according to her wishes.
It may sound simple, but meeting these standards comes with myriad complications. Whose job is it to weigh the risk that Mary might be reidentified, even if her information is de-identified and stored securely? How should that assessment be done? How can data from Mary’s records be aggregated with patients from health systems in other countries, each with their own requirements for data protection and formats for record keeping? How can Mary’s wishes be respected, both in terms of what research is conducted and in returning relevant results to her?
From electronic medical records to genomic sequencing, health care providers and researchers now have an unprecedented wealth of information that could help tailor treatments to individual needs, revolutionize understanding of disease, and enhance the overall quality of health care. Data protection, privacy safeguards, and cybersecurity are all paramount for safeguarding sensitive medical information, but much of the potential that lies in this abundance of data is being lost because well-intentioned regulations have not been set up to allow for data sharing and collaboration. This stymies efforts to study rare diseases, map disease patterns, improve public health surveillance, and advance evidence-based policymaking (for instance, by comparing effectiveness of interventions across regions and demographics). Projects that could excel with enough data get bogged down in bureaucracy and uncertainty. For example, Germany now has strict data protection laws—with heavy punishment for violations—that should allow de-identified health insurance claims to be used for research within secure processing environments, but the legality of such use has been challenged…(More)”.
AI is too important to be monopolised
Article by Marietje Schaake: “…From the promise of medical breakthroughs to the perils of election interference, the hopes of helpful climate research to the challenge of cracking fundamental physics, AI is too important to be monopolised.
Yet the market is moving in exactly that direction, as resources and talent to develop the most advanced AI sit firmly in the hands of a very small number of companies. That is particularly true for resource-intensive data and computing power (termed “compute”), which are required to train large language models for a variety of AI applications. Researchers and small and medium-sized enterprises risk fatal dependency on Big Tech once again, or else they will miss out on the latest wave of innovation.
On both sides of the Atlantic, feverish public investments are being made in an attempt to level the computational playing field. To ensure scientists have access to capacities comparable to those of Silicon Valley giants, the US government established the National AI Research Resource last month. This pilot project is being led by the US National Science Foundation. By working with 10 other federal agencies and 25 civil society groups, it will facilitate government-funded data and compute to help the research and education community build and understand AI.
The EU set up a decentralised network of supercomputers with a similar aim back in 2018, before the recent wave of generative AI created a new sense of urgency. The EuroHPC has lived in relative obscurity and the initiative appears to have been under-exploited. As European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said late last year: we need to put this power to use. The EU now imagines that democratised supercomputer access can also help with the creation of “AI factories,” where small businesses pool their resources to develop new cutting-edge models.
There has long been talk of considering access to the internet a public utility, because of how important it is for education, employment and acquiring information. Yet rules to that end were never adopted. But with the unlocking of compute as a shared good, the US and the EU are showing real willingness to make investments into public digital infrastructure.
Even if the latest measures are viewed as industrial policy in a new jacket, they are part of a long overdue step to shape the digital market and offset the outsized power of big tech companies in various corners of our societies…(More)”.
Tech Strikes Back
Essay by Nadia Asparouhova: “A new tech ideology is ascendant online. “Introducing effective accelerationism,” the pseudonymous user Beff Jezos tweeted, rather grandly, in May 2022. “E/acc” — pronounced ee-ack — “is a direct product [of the] tech Twitter schizosphere,” he wrote. “We hope you join us in this new endeavour.”
The reaction from Jezos’s peers was a mix of positive, critical, and perplexed. “What the f*** is e/acc,” posted multiple users. “Accelerationism is unfortunately now just a buzzword,” sighed political scientist Samo Burja, referring to a related concept popularized around 2017. “I guess unavoidable for Twitter subcultures?” “These [people] are absolutely bonkers,” grumbled Timnit Gebru, an artificial intelligence researcher and activist who frequently criticizes the tech industry. “Their fanaticism + god complex is exhausting.”
Despite the criticism, e/acc persists, and is growing, in the tech hive mind. E/acc’s founders believe that the tech world has become captive to a monoculture. If it becomes paralyzed by a fear of the future, it will never produce meaningful benefits. Instead, e/acc encourages more ideas, more growth, more competition, more action. “Whether you’re building a family, a startup, a spaceship, a robot, or better energy policy, just build,” writes one anonymous poster. “Do something hard. Do it for everyone who comes next. That’s it. Existence will take care of the rest.”…(More)”.
We urgently need data for equitable personalized medicine
Article by Manuel Corpas: “…As a bioinformatician, I am now focusing my attention on gathering the statistics to show just how biased medical research data are. There are problems across the board, ranging from which research questions get asked in the first place, to who participates in clinical trials, to who gets their genomes sequenced. The world is moving toward “precision medicine,” where any individual can have their DNA analyzed and that information can be used to help prescribe the right drugs in the right dosages. But this won’t work if a person’s genetic variants have never been identified or studied in the first place.
It’s astonishing how powerful our genetics can be in mediating medicines. Take the gene CYP2D6, which is known to play a vital role in how fast humans metabolize 25 percent of all the pharmaceuticals on the market. If you have a genetic variant of CYP2D6 that makes you metabolize drugs more quickly, or less quickly, it can have a huge impact on how well those drugs work and the dangers you face from taking them. Codeine was banned from all of Ethiopia in 2015, for example, because a high proportion of people in the country (perhaps 30 percent) have a genetic variant of CYP2D6 that makes them quickly metabolize that drug into morphine, making it more likely to cause respiratory distress and even death…(More)”
Consumer vulnerability in the digital age
OECD Report: “Protecting consumers when they are most vulnerable has long been a core focus of consumer policy. This report first discusses the nature and scale of consumer vulnerability in the digital age, including its evolving conceptualisation, the role of emerging digital trends, and implications for consumer policy. It finds that in the digital age, vulnerability may be experienced not only by some consumers, but increasingly by most, if not all, consumers. Accordingly, it sets out several measures to address the vulnerability of specific consumer groups and all consumers, and concludes with avenues for more research on the topic…(More)”.