The Age of Prediction: Algorithms, AI, and the Shifting Shadows of Risk

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Igor Tulchinsky and Christopher E. Mason: “… about two powerful, and symbiotic, trends: the rapid development and use of artificial intelligence and big data to enhance prediction, as well as the often paradoxical effects of these better predictions on our understanding of risk and the ways we live. Beginning with dramatic advances in quantitative investing and precision medicine, this book explores how predictive technology is quietly reshaping our world in fundamental ways, from crime fighting and warfare to monitoring individual health and elections.

As prediction grows more robust, it also alters the nature of the accompanying risk, setting up unintended and unexpected consequences. The Age of Prediction details how predictive certainties can bring about complacency or even an increase in risks—genomic analysis might lead to unhealthier lifestyles or a GPS might encourage less attentive driving. With greater predictability also comes a degree of mystery, and the authors ask how narrower risks might affect markets, insurance, or risk tolerance generally. Can we ever reduce risk to zero? Should we even try? This book lays an intriguing groundwork for answering these fundamental questions and maps out the latest tools and technologies that power these projections into the future, sometimes using novel, cross-disciplinary tools to map out cancer growth, people’s medical risks, and stock dynamics…(More)”.

To measure social impact, we could start by using the tools we already have

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Shamina Singh: “…To measure social impact, we could start by using the tools we already have.

In the environmental context, companies have adopted the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol, which tracks the full spectrum of a company’s carbon emissions. The first scope accounts for direct emissions from its operations, the second relates to indirect emissions from energy purchased by the company, and the third tracks indirect emissions from a company’s entire value chain.

At the Center for Inclusive Growth, we have been thinking about how to capture social impact in a similarly methodical way. Just as the environmental framework is tied to the level of control over the source of emissions, we could account for the level of control in social impact. I’ll offer up the following framework to show how our team is thinking about this challenge, so we can help spark a dialogue using the following as a conceptual starting point.

The first scope could cover each company’s approach toward its own employees, since companies have a direct influence on this stakeholder group through workplace investments, programs, and corporate culture. This category could assess pay equity, diversity within leadership ranks, talent development and career progression for underrepresented groups, labor standards, and more. Many companies already track these metrics.

Then, the second scope could look at how companies leverage their core competencies, deploy their products and services and work within their supply chains to help address societal challenges. Companies have skills, technologies, and capital that can create widespread social benefits, and many are already leading the way. The activity in this second category involves stakeholders at a level of control that is less direct than the first, such as customers and suppliers.

Finally, philanthropic giving, volunteering, and other community investments would comprise the third scope. This level of control is distinct from the second scope because company resources are entrusted to other entities that make decisions about how it’s spent. These efforts, while indirect, can strengthen a company’s brand and reputation, cultivate innovation and opportunity, and generate significant societal value.

From there, it’s about measuring the outputs of our investments in all three scopes. A system of accountability for follow-through is vital because when it comes to improving people’s lives, communities, and futures, outcomes matter-not just effort.

There is so much good work happening in the social impact space, but much more work to be done to measure it. To incentivize continued progress, we have to start quantifying the impact, even if the best way to do that looks different across companies or industries…(More)”

The adoption of innovation in international development organisations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “Addressing 21st century development challenges requires investments in innovation, including the use of new approaches and technologies. Currently, many development organisations prioritise investments in isolated innovation pilots that leverage a specific approach or technology rather than pursuing a strategic approach to expand the organisation’s toolbox with innovations that have proven their comparative advantage over what is currently used. This Working Paper addresses this challenge of adopting innovations. How can development organisations institutionalise a new way of working, bringing what was once novel to the core of how business is done? Analysing successful adoption efforts across five DAC agencies, the paper lays out a proposed process for the adoption of innovations. The paper features five case-studies and concludes with a set of lessons and recommendations for policy makers on innovation management generally, and adoption of innovation in particular…(More)”.

The Legal Singularity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie: “…argue that the proliferation of artificial intelligence–enabled technology – and specifically the advent of legal prediction – is on the verge of radically reconfiguring the law, our institutions, and our society for the better.

Revealing the ways in which our legal institutions underperform and are expensive to administer, the book highlights the negative social consequences associated with our legal status quo. Given the infirmities of the current state of the law and our legal institutions, the silver lining is that there is ample room for improvement. With concerted action, technology can help us to ameliorate the problems of the law and improve our legal institutions. Inspired in part by the concept of the “technological singularity,” The Legal Singularity presents a future state in which technology facilitates the functional “completeness” of law, where the law is at once extraordinarily more complex in its specification than it is today, and yet operationally, the law is vastly more knowable, fairer, and clearer for its subjects. Aidid and Alarie describe the changes that will culminate in the legal singularity and explore the implications for the law and its institutions…(More)”.

The Early History of Counting

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Keith Houston: “Figuring out when humans began to count systematically, with purpose, is not easy. Our first real clues are a handful of curious, carved bones dating from the final few millennia of the three-​million-​year expanse of the Old Stone Age, or Paleolithic era. Those bones are humanity’s first pocket calculators: For the prehistoric humans who carved them, they were mathematical notebooks and counting aids rolled into one. For the anthropologists who unearthed them thousands of years later, they were proof that our ability to count had manifested itself no later than 40,000 years ago.

In 1973, while excavating a cave in the Lebombo Mountains, near South Africa’s border with Swaziland, Peter Beaumont found a small, broken bone with twenty-​nine notches carved across it. The so-​called Border Cave had been known to archaeologists since 1934, but the discovery during World War II of skeletal remains dating to the Middle Stone Age heralded a site of rare importance. It was not until Beaumont’s dig in the 1970s, however, that the cave gave up its most significant treasure: the earliest known tally stick, in the form of a notched, three-​inch long baboon fibula.

On the face of it, the numerical instrument known as the tally stick is exceedingly mundane. Used since before recorded history—​still used, in fact, by some cultures—​to mark the passing days, or to account for goods or monies given or received, most tally sticks are no more than wooden rods incised with notches along their length. They help their users to count, to remember, and to transfer ownership. All of which is reminiscent of writing, except that writing did not arrive until a scant 5,000 years ago—​and so, when the Lebombo bone was determined to be some 42,000 years old, it instantly became one of the most intriguing archaeological artifacts ever found. Not only does it put a date on when Homo sapiens started counting, it also marks the point at which we began to delegate our memories to external devices, thereby unburdening our minds so that they might be used for something else instead. Writing in 1776, the German historian Justus Möser knew nothing of the Lebombo bone, but his musings on tally sticks in general are strikingly apposite:

The notched tally stick itself testifies to the intelligence of our ancestors. No invention is simpler and yet more significant than this…(More)”.

An AI Model Tested In The Ukraine War Is Helping Assess Damage From The Hawaii Wildfires

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Irene Benedicto: “On August 7, 2023, the day before the Maui wildfires started in Hawaii, a constellation of earth-observing satellites took multiple pictures of the island at noon, local time. Everything was quiet, still. The next day, at the same, the same satellites captured images of fires consuming the island. Planet, a San Francisco-based company that owns the largest fleet of satellites taking pictures of the Earth daily, provided this raw imagery to Microsoft engineers, who used it to train an AI model designed to analyze the impact of disasters. Comparing before and after the fire photographs, the AI model created maps that highlighted the most devastated areas of the island.

With this information, the Red Cross rearranged its work on the field that same day to respond to the most urgent priorities first, helping evacuate thousands of people who’ve been affected by one of the deadliest fires in over a century. The Hawaii wildfires have already killed over a hundred people, a hundred more remain missing and at least 11,000 people have been displaced. The relief efforts are ongoing 10 days after the start of the fire, which burned over 3,200 acres. Hawaii Governor Josh Green estimated the recovery efforts could cost $6 billion.

Planet and Microsoft AI were able to pull and analyze the satellite imagery so quickly because they’d struggled to do so the last time they deployed their system: during the Ukraine war. The successful response in Maui is the result of a year and a half of building a new AI tool that corrected fundamental flaws in the previous system, which didn’t accurately recognize collapsed buildings in a background of concrete.

“When Ukraine happened, all the AI models failed miserably,” Juan Lavista, chief scientist at Microsoft AI, told Forbes.

The problem was that the company’s previous AI models were mainly trained with natural disasters in the U.S. and Africa. But devastation doesn’t look the same when it is caused by war and in an Eastern European city. “We learned that having one single model that would adapt to every single place on earth was likely impossible,” Lavista said…(More)”.

Tools of digital innovation in public affairs management: A practice-oriented analysis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alberto Bitonti: “While the literature on digital transformation is growing in several fields, research on the effects of digital innovation in the practice of public affairs is still scattered and unsystematic, mostly focusing on interest groups’ social media strategies. However, digital innovation has begun to change the practice of public affairs management in many areas, especially in the form of datafication, AI analytics, and cloud-based knowledge management platforms. Growing possibilities in the use of data science and evidence-informed strategic decision-making have arisen in domains traditionally shaped by intuitions and non-codified professional experience. Based on desk research of case studies and hands-on analyses of three increasingly popular public affairs management software platforms (FiscalNote, Quorum, KMIND), this article develops a practice-oriented analysis of various digital tools and functionalities available to public affairs practitioners today, tackling a gap in the literature on how digital innovation can impact the management of several activities along the different phases of a public affairs campaign (monitoring and analysis, strategy design, action, assessment). The article thus highlights how digital innovation goes way beyond the sheer use of social media in communication activities, impacting the practice of public affairs on a deeper and more strategic level…(More)”.

What is the value of data? A review of empirical methods

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Diane Coyle and Annabel Manley: “With the growing use of digital technologies, data have become core to many organizations’ decisions, with its value widely acknowledged across public and private sectors. Yet few comprehensive empirical approaches to establishing the value of data exist, and there is no consensus about which methods should be applied to specific data types or purposes. This paper examines a range of data valuation methodologies proposed in the existing literature. We propose a typology linking methods to different data types and purposes…(More)”.

Driving Excellence in Official Statistics: Unleashing the Potential of Comprehensive Digital Data Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Hossein Hassani and Steve McFeely: “With the ubiquitous use of digital technologies and the consequent data deluge, official statistics faces new challenges and opportunities. In this context, strengthening official statistics through effective data governance will be crucial to ensure reliability, quality, and access to data. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for digital data governance for official statistics, addressing key components, such as data collection and management, processing and analysis, data sharing and dissemination, as well as privacy and ethical considerations. The framework integrates principles of data governance into digital statistical processes, enabling statistical organizations to navigate the complexities of the digital environment. Drawing on case studies and best practices, the paper highlights successful implementations of digital data governance in official statistics. The paper concludes by discussing future trends and directions, including emerging technologies and opportunities for advancing digital data governance…(More)”.

The Urgent Need to Reimagine Data Consent

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stefaan G. Verhulst, Laura Sandor & Julia Stamm: “Recognizing the significant benefits that can arise from the use and reuse of data to tackle contemporary challenges such as migration, it is worth exploring new approaches to collect and utilize data that empower individuals and communities, granting them the ability to determine how their data can be utilized for various personal, community, and societal causes. This need is not specific to migrants alone. It applies to various regions, populations, and fields, ranging from public health and education to urban mobility. There is a pressing demand to involve communities, often already vulnerable, to establish responsible access to their data that aligns with their expectations, while simultaneously serving the greater public good.

We believe the answer lies through a reimagination of the concept of consent. Traditionally, consent has been the tool of choice to secure agency and individual rights, but that concept, we would suggest, is no longer sufficient to today’s era of datafication. Instead, we should strive to establish a new standard of social license. Here, we’ll define what we mean by a social license and outline some of the limitations of consent (as it is typically defined and practiced today). Then we’ll describe one possible means of securing social license—through participatory decision -making…(More)”.