Article by J. Ignacio Criado et al: “This article presents a study about artificial intelligence (AI) policy based on the perceptions, expectations, and challenges/opportunities given by chief information officers (CIOs). In general, publications about AI in the public sector relies on experiences, cases, ideas, and results from the private sector. Our study stands out from the need of defining a distinctive approach to AI in the public sector, gathering primary (and comparative) data from different countries, and assessing the key role of CIOs to frame federal/national AI policies and strategies. This article reports three research questions, including three dimensions of analysis: (1) perceptions regarding to the concept of AI in the public sector; (2) expectations about the development of AI in the public sector; and, (3) challenges and opportunities of AI in the public sector. This exploratory study presents the results of a survey administered to federal/national ministerial government CIOs in ministries of Mexico and Spain. Our descriptive statistical (and exploratory) analysis provides an overall approach to our dimensions, exploratory answering the research questions of the study. Our data supports the existence of different governance models and policy priorities in different countries. Also, these results might inform research in this same area and will help senior officials to assess the national AI policies actually in process of design and implementation in different national/federal, regional/state, and local/municipal contexts….(More)”.
Switzerland to Hold Referendum on Covid-19 Lockdown
James Hookway at the Wall Street Journal: “Switzerland’s system of direct democracy will be put to the test again later this year, this time with a referendum on whether to roll back the government’s powers to impose lockdowns and other measures to slow the Covid-19 pandemic.
The landlocked Alpine nation of 8.5 million people is unusual in providing its people a say on important policy moves by offering referendums if enough people sign a petition for a vote. Last year, Swiss voted on increasing the stock of low-cost housing, tax allowances for children and hunting wolves.
The idea is to provide citizens a check on the power of the federal government, and it is a throwback to the fiercely independent patchwork of cantons, or districts, that were meshed in the medieval period.
Now, the country is set for a referendum on whether to remove the government’s legal authority to order lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions after campaigners submitted a petition of some 86,000 signatures this week—higher than the 50,000 required—triggering a nationwide vote to repeal last year’s Covid-19 Act….(More)”.
Inaccurate Data, Half-Truths, Disinformation, and Mob Violence
Image credit: Kayla Velasquez/Unsplash.
Selected Readings by Fiona Cece, Uma Kalkar, and Stefaan Verhulst: “The mob attack on the US Congress was alarming and the result of various efforts to undermine the trust in and legitimacy of longstanding democratic processes and institutions. In particular, the use of inaccurate data, half-truths, and disinformation to spread hate and division is considered a key driver behind last week’s attack. Altering data to support conspiracy theories or challenging and undermining the credibility of trusted data sources to allow for alternative narratives to flourish, if left unchallenged, has consequences — including the increased acceptance and use of violence both off-line and on-line.
Everyone working on data and information needs to be aware of the implications of altering or misusing data (including election results) to support malicious objectives. The January 6th riot is unfortunately not a unique event, nor is it contained to the US. Below, we provide a curation of findings and readings that illustrate the global danger of inaccurate data, half-truths, and willful disinformation….(Readings)”.
Cognitive Science as a New People Science for the Future of Work
Brief by Frida Polli et al: “The notion of studying people in jobs as a science—in fields such as human resource management, people analytics, and industrial-organizational psychology—dates back to at least the early 20th century. In 1919, Yale psychologist Henry Charles Link wrote, “The application of science to the problem of employment is just beginning to receive serious attention,” at last providing an alternative to the “hire and fire” methods of 19th-century employers. A year later, prominent organizational theorists Ordway Teal and Henry C. Metcalf claimed, “The new focus in administration is to be the human element. The new center of attention and solicitude is the individual person, the worker.” The overall conclusion at the time was that various social and psychological factors governed differences in employee productivity and satisfaction….This Brief Proceeds in Five Sections:
● First, we review the limitations of traditional approaches to people science. In particular, we focus on four needs of the modern employer that are not satisfied by the status quo: job fit, soft skills, fairness, and flexibility.
● Second, we present the foundations of a new people science by explaining how advancements in fields like cognitive science and neuroscience can be used to understand the individual differences between humans.
● Third, we describe four best practices that should govern the application of the new people science theories to real-world employment contexts.
● Fourth, we present a case study of how one platform company has used the new people science to create hiring models for five high-growth roles.● Finally, we explain how the type of insights presented in Section IV can be made actionable in the context of retraining employees for the future of work….(More)”.
Rescuing Our Democracy by Rethinking New York Times Co. v. Sullivan
Paper by David Andrew Logan: “New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) is an iconic decision, foundational to modern First Amendment theory, and in a string of follow-on decisions the Court firmly grounded free speech theory and practice in the need to protect democratic discourse. To do this the Court provided broad and deep protections to the publishers of falsehoods. This article recognizes that New York Times and its progeny made sense in the “public square” of an earlier era, but the justices could never have foreseen the dramatic changes in technology and the media environment in the years since, nor predict that by making defamation cases virtually impossible to win they were harming, rather than helping self-government. In part because of New York Times, the First Amendment has been weaponized, frustrating a basic requirement of a healthy democracy: the development of a set of broadly agreed-upon facts. Instead, we are subject to waves of falsehoods that swamp the ability of citizens to effectively self-govern. As a result, and despite its iconic status, New York Times needs to be reexamined and retooled to better serve our democracy….(More)”
The pandemic has pushed citizen panels online
Article by Claudia Chwalisz: “…Until 2020, most assemblies took place in person. We know what they require to produce useful recommendations and gain public trust: time (usually many days over many months), access to broad and varied information, facilitated discussion, and transparency. Successful assemblies take on a pressing public issue, secure politicians’ commitment to respond, have mechanisms to ensure independence, and provide facilities such as stipends and childcare, so all can participate. The diversity of people in the room is what delivers the magic of collective intelligence.
However, the pandemic has forced new approaches. Online discussions might be in real time or asynchronous; facilitators and participants might be identifiable or anonymous. My team at the OECD is exploring how virtual deliberation works best. We have noticed a shift: from text-based interactions to video; from an emphasis on openness to one on representativeness; and from individual to group deliberation.
Some argue that online deliberation is less expensive than in-person processes, but the costs are similar when designed to be as democratic as possible. The new wave pays much more attention to inclusivity. For many online citizens’ assemblies this year (for example, in Belgium, Canada and parts of the United Kingdom), participants without equipment were given computers or smartphones, along with training and support to use them. A digital mediator is now essential for any plans to conduct online deliberation inclusively.
Experiments have also started to transcend national borders. Last October, the German Bertelsmann Stiftung, a private foundation for political reform, and the European Commission ran a Citizens’ Dialogue with 100 randomly selected citizens from Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Lithuania. They spent three days discussing Europe’s democratic, digital and green future. The Global Citizens’ Assembly on Genome Editing will take place in 2021–22, as will the Global Citizens’ Assembly for the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
However, virtual meetings do not replace in-person interactions. Practitioners adapting assemblies to the virtual world warn that online processes could push people into more linear and binary thinking through voting tools, rather than seeking a nuanced understanding of other people’s reasoning and values….(More)”.
Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism
Book by Mariana Mazzucato: “Even before the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, capitalism was stuck. It had no answers to a host of problems, including disease, inequality, the digital divide and, perhaps most blatantly, the environmental crisis. Taking her inspiration from the ‘moonshot’ programmes which successfully co-ordinated public and private sectors on a massive scale, Mariana Mazzucato calls for the same level of boldness and experimentation to be applied to the biggest problems of our time. We must, she argues, rethink the capacities and role of government within the economy and society, and above all recover a sense of public purpose. Mission Economy, whose ideas are already being adopted around the world, offers a way out of our impasse to a more optimistic future….(More)”.
When FOIA Goes to Court: 20 Years of Freedom of Information Act Litigation by News Organizations and Reporters
Report by The FOIA Project: “The news media are powerful players in the world of government transparency and public accountability. One important tool for ensuring public accountability is through invoking transparency mandates provided by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In 2020, news organizations and individual reporters filed 122 different FOIA suits[1] to compel disclosure of federal government records—more than any year on record according to federal court data back to 2001 analyzed by the FOIA Project.
In fact, the media alone have filed a total of 386 FOIA cases during the four years of the Trump Administration, from 2017 through 2020. This is greater than the total of 311 FOIA media cases filed during the sixteen years of the Bush and Obama Administrations combined. Moreover, many of these FOIA cases were the very first FOIA cases filed by members of the news media. Almost as many new FOIA litigators filed their first case in court in the past four years—178 from 2017 to 2020—than the years 2001 to 2016, when 196 FOIA litigators filed their first case. Reporters made up the majority of these. During the past four years, more than four out of five of first-time litigators were individual reporters. The ranks of FOIA litigators thus expanded considerably during the Trump Administration, with more reporters challenging agencies in court for failing to provide records they are seeking, either alone or with their news organizations.
Using the FOIA Project’s unique dataset of FOIA cases filed in federal court, this report provides unprecedented and valuable insight into the rapid growth of media lawsuits designed to make the government more transparent and accountable to the public. The complete, updated list of news media cases, along with the names of organizations and reporters who filed these suits, is available on the News Media List at FOIAProject.org. Figure 1shows the total number of FOIA cases filed by the news each year. Counts are available in Appendix Table 1 at the end of this report….(More)”.
10 Questions That Will Determine the Future of Work
Article by Jeffrey Brown and Stefaan Verhulst: “…But in many cases, policymakers face a blizzard of contradictory information and forecasts that can lead to confusion and inaction. Unable to make sense of the torrent of data being thrown their way, policymakers often end up being preoccupied by the answers presented — rather than reflecting on the questions that matter.
If we want to design “good” future-of-work policies, we must have an inclusive and wide-ranging discussion of what we are trying to solve before we attempt to develop and deploy solutions….
We have found that policymakers often fail to ask questions and are often uncertain about the variables that underpin a problem.
In addition, few of the interventions that have been deployed make the best use of data, an emerging but underused asset that is increasingly available as a result of the ongoing digital transformation. If civil society, think tanks and others fail to create the space for a sustainable future-of-work policy to germinate, “solutions” without clearly articulated problems will continue to dictate policy…
Our 100 Questions Initiative seeks to interrupt this cycle of preoccupation with answers by ensuring that policymakers are, first of all, armed with a methodology they can use to ask the right questions and from there, craft the right solutions.
We are now releasing the top 10 questions and are seeking the public’s assistance through voting and providing feedback on whether or not these are really the right questions we should be asking:
Preparing for the Future of Work
- How can we determine the value of skills relevant to the future-of work-marketplace, and how can we increase the value of human labor in the 21st century?
- What are the economic and social costs and benefits of modernizing worker-support systems and providing social protection for workers of all employment backgrounds, but particularly for women and those in part-time or informal work?
- How does the current use of AI affect diversity and equity in the labor force? How can AI be used to increase the participation of underrepresented groups (including women, Black people, Latinx people, and low-income communities)? What aspects/strategies have proved most effective in reducing AI biases?…(More) (See also: https://future-of-work.the100questions.org/)
Embracing Innovation in Government: Public Provider versus Big Brother
The fourth report in this series by the OECD: “…explores the powerful new technologies and opportunities that governments have at their disposal to let them better understand the needs of citizens. The research shows that governments must balance the tensions of using data harvesting and monitoring, and technologies that can identify individuals, to serve the public interest, with the inevitable concerns and legitimate fears about “big brother” and risks of infringing on freedoms and rights. Through the lens of navigating Public Provider versus Big Brother, innovation efforts fall into two key themes:
Theme 1: Data harvesting and monitoring
Governments have access to more detailed data than ever before, but such access involves risks and considerations which require serious reflection on the part of government.
Theme 2: Biometric technologies and facial recognition
A range of biometric tools offer opportunities to provide tailored services, as well as the unprecedented ability to identify and track individuals’ behaviours and movements….(More)”.