Paper by Nino Junius and Joke Matthieu: “In recent years, pessimism about plebiscitary intra-party democracy has been challenged by assembly-based models of intra-party democracy. However, research has yet to explore the emergence of new power dynamics in parties originating from the implementation of deliberative practices in their intra-party democracy. We investigate how deliberative democratization reshuffles power relations within political parties through a case study of Agora, an internally deliberative movement party in Belgium. Employing a process-tracing approach using original interview and participant observation data, we argue that while plebiscitary intra-party democracy shifts power towards passive members prone to elite domination, our case suggests that deliberative intra-party democracy shifts power towards active members that are more likely to be critical of elites…(More)”
The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants
Book by Karen Bakker: “The natural world teems with remarkable conversations, many beyond human hearing range. Scientists are using groundbreaking digital technologies to uncover these astonishing sounds, revealing vibrant communication among our fellow creatures across the Tree of Life.
At once meditative and scientific, The Sounds of Life shares fascinating and surprising stories of nonhuman sound, interweaving insights from technological innovation and traditional knowledge. We meet scientists using sound to protect and regenerate endangered species from the Great Barrier Reef to the Arctic and the Amazon. We discover the shocking impacts of noise pollution on both animals and plants. We learn how artificial intelligence can decode nonhuman sounds, and meet the researchers building dictionaries in East African Elephant and Sperm Whalish. At the frontiers of innovation, we explore digitally mediated dialogues with bats and honeybees. Technology often distracts us from nature, but what if it could reconnect us instead?
The Sounds of Life offers hope for environmental conservation and affirms humanity’s relationship with nature in the digital age. After learning about the unsuspected wonders of nature’s sounds, we will never see walks outdoors in the same way again…(More)”.
Can Social Media Rhetoric Incite Hate Incidents? Evidence from Trump’s “Chinese Virus” Tweets
Paper by Andy Cao, Jason M. Lindo & Jiee Zhong: “We will investigate whether Donald Trump’s “Chinese Virus” tweets contributed to the rise of anti-Asian incidents. We find that the number of incidents spiked following Trump’s initial “Chinese Virus” tweets and the subsequent dramatic rise in internet search activity for the phrase. Difference-in-differences and event-study analyses leveraging spatial variation indicate that this spike in anti-Asian incidents was significantly more pronounced in counties that supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election relative to those that supported Hillary Clinton. We estimate that anti-Asian incidents spiked by 4000 percent in Trump-supporting counties, over and above the spike observed in Clinton-supporting counties…(More)”.
How Confucianism could put fear about Artificial Intelligence to bed
Article by Tom Cassauwers: “Western culture has had a long history of individualism, warlike use of technology, Christian apocalyptic thinking and a strong binary between body and soul. These elements might explain the West’s obsession with the technological apocalypse and its opposite: techno-utopianism. In Asia, it’s now common to explain China’s dramatic rise as a leader in AI and robotics as a consequence of state support from the world’s largest economy. But what if — in addition to the massive state investment — China and other Asian nations have another advantage, in the form of Eastern philosophies?
There’s a growing view among independent researchers and philosophers that Confucianism and Buddhism could offer healthy alternative perspectives on the future of technology. And with AI and robots rapidly increasing in importance across industries, it’s time for the West to turn to the East for answers…
So what would a non-Western way of thinking about tech look like? First, there might be a different interpretation of personhood. Both Confucianism and Buddhism potentially open up the way for nonhumans to reach the status of humans. In Confucianism, the state of reaching personhood “is not a given. You need to work to achieve it,” says Wong. The person’s attitude toward certain ethical virtues determines whether or not they reach the status of a human. That also means that “we can attribute personhood to nonhuman things like robots when they play ethically relevant roles and duties as humans,” Wong adds.
Buddhism offers a similar argument, where robots can hypothetically achieve a state of enlightenment, which is present everywhere, not only in humans — an argument made as early as the 1970s by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. It may not be a coincidence that robots enjoy some of their highest social acceptance in Japan, with its Buddhist heritage. “Westerners are generally reluctant about the nature of robotics and AI, considering only humans as true beings, while Easterners more often consider devices as similar to humans,” says Jordi Vallverdú, a professor of philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona….(More)”
Antitrust, Regulation, and User Union in the Era of Digital Platforms and Big Data
Paper by Lin William Cong and Simon Mayer: “We model platform competition with endogenous data generation, collection, and sharing, thereby providing a unifying framework to evaluate data-related regulation and antitrust policies. Data are jointly produced from users’ economic activities and platforms’ investments in data infrastructure. Data improves service quality, causing a feedback loop that tends to concentrate market power. Dispersed users do not internalize the impact of their data contribution on (i) service quality for other users, (ii) market concentration, and (iii) platforms’ incentives to invest in data infrastructure, causing inefficient over- or under-collection of data. Data sharing proposals, user privacy protections, platform commitments, and markets for data cannot fully address these inefficiencies. We propose and analyze user union, which represents and coordinates users, as an effective solution for antitrust and consumer protection in the digital era…(More)”.
Philanthropy to Protect US Democracy
Essay by Lukas Haynes: “…Given the threat of election subversion, philanthropists who care about democracy across the political spectrum must now deploy donations as effectively as they can. In their seminal book, Money Well Spent: A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy, Paul Brest and Hal Harvey argue that generating “alternative solutions” to hard problems “requires creativity or innovation akin to that of a scientist or engineer—creativity that is goal-oriented, that aims to come up with pragmatic solutions to a problem.”
In seeking the most effective solutions, Brest and Harvey do not find that nonpartisan, charitable efforts are the only legitimate form of strategic giving. Instead, they encourage donors to identify clear problem-solving goals, sound strategy, and clarity about risk tolerance.
Given the concerted attack on democratic norms by political candidates, there is no more effective alternative at hand than using political donations to defeat those candidates. If it is not already part of donors’ philanthropic toolkit to protect democracy, it needs to be and soon.
Once Big Lie-promoting candidates win and take power over elections, it will be too late to repeal their authority, especially in states where Republicans control the state legislatures. Should they successfully subvert a national presidential election in a deeply polarized nation, the United States will have crossed an undemocratic Rubicon no well-intentioned American wants to witness. So what are the most effective ways for political donors to respond to this perilous moment?…(More)”.
Charting an Equity-Centered Public Health Data System
Introduction to Special Issue by Alonzo L. Plough: “…The articles in this special issue were written with that vision in mind; several of them even informed the commission’s deliberations. Each article addresses an issue essential to the challenge of building an equity-focused public health data system:
- Why Equity Matters in Public Health Data. Authors Anita Chandra, Laurie T. Martin, Joie D. Acosta, Christopher Nelson, Douglas Yeung, Nabeel Qureshi, and Tara Blagg explore where and how equity has been lacking in public health data and the implications of considering equity to the tech and data sectors.
- What is Public Health Data? As authors Joie D. Acosta, Anita Chandra, Douglas Yeung, Christopher Nelson, Nabeel Qureshi, Tara Blagg, and Laurie T. Martin explain, good public health data are more than just health data. We need to reimagine the types of data we collect and from where, as well data precision, granularity, timeliness, and more.
- Public Health Data and Special Populations. People of color, women, people with disabilities, and people who are lesbian, gay bisexual trans-gendered queer are among the populations that have been inconsistently represented in public health data over time. This article by authors Tina J. Kauh and Maryam Khojasteh reviews findings for each population, as well as commonalities across populations.
- Public health data interoperability and connectedness. What are challenges to connecting public health data swiftly yet accurately? What gaps need to be filled? How can the data and tech sector help address these issues? These are some of the questions explored in this article by authors Laurie T. Martin, Christopher Nelson, Douglas Yeung, Joie D. Acosta, Nabeel Qureshi, Tara Blagg, and Anita Chandra.
- Integrating Tech and Data Expertise into the Public Health Workforce. This article by authors Laurie T. Martin, Anita Chandra, Christopher Nelson, Douglas Yeung, Joie D. Acosta, Nabeel Qureshi, and Tara Blag envisions what a tech-savvy public health workforce will look like and how it can be achieved through new workforce models, opportunities to expand capacity, and training….(More)”.
Innovative Data Science Approaches to Identify Individuals, Populations, and Communities at High Risk for Suicide
Report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “Emerging real-time data sources, together with innovative data science techniques and methods – including artificial intelligence and machine learning – can help inform upstream suicide prevention efforts. Select social media platforms have proactively deployed these methods to identify individual platform users at high risk for suicide, and in some cases may activate local law enforcement, if needed, to prevent imminent suicide. To explore the current scope of activities, benefits, and risks of leveraging innovative data science techniques to help inform upstream suicide prevention at the individual and population level, the Forum on Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a virtual workshop series consisting of three webinars held on April 28, May 12, and June 30, 2022. This Proceedings highlights presentations and discussions from the workshop…(More)”
Does AI Debias Recruitment? Race, Gender, and AI’s “Eradication of Difference”
Paper by Eleanor Drage & Kerry Mackereth: “In this paper, we analyze two key claims offered by recruitment AI companies in relation to the development and deployment of AI-powered HR tools: (1) recruitment AI can objectively assess candidates by removing gender and race from their systems, and (2) this removal of gender and race will make recruitment fairer, help customers attain their DEI goals, and lay the foundations for a truly meritocratic culture to thrive within an organization. We argue that these claims are misleading for four reasons: First, attempts to “strip” gender and race from AI systems often misunderstand what gender and race are, casting them as isolatable attributes rather than broader systems of power. Second, the attempted outsourcing of “diversity work” to AI-powered hiring tools may unintentionally entrench cultures of inequality and discrimination by failing to address the systemic problems within organizations. Third, AI hiring tools’ supposedly neutral assessment of candidates’ traits belie the power relationship between the observer and the observed. Specifically, the racialized history of character analysis and its associated processes of classification and categorization play into longer histories of taxonomical sorting and reflect the current demands and desires of the job market, even when not explicitly conducted along the lines of gender and race. Fourth, recruitment AI tools help produce the “ideal candidate” that they supposedly identify through by constructing associations between words and people’s bodies. From these four conclusions outlined above, we offer three key recommendations to AI HR firms, their customers, and policy makers going forward…(More)”.
We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World
Book by Brian Michael Murphy: “Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America’s most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records that now accompany each of us from birth to death. This data complex backs up and protects our most vital information against decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and government institutions whose power is also preserved in its bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces.
We the Dead traces the emergence of the data complex in the early twentieth century and guides readers through its expansion in a series of moments when Americans thought they were living just before the end of the world. Depression-era eugenicists feared racial contamination and the downfall of the white American family, while contemporary technologists seek ever denser and more durable materials for storing data, from microetched metal discs to cryptocurrency keys encoded in synthetic DNA. Artfully written and packed with provocative ideas, this haunting book illuminates the dark places of the data complex and the ways it increasingly blurs the lines between human and machine, biological body and data body, life and digital afterlife…(More)”.