Think, before you nudge: those who pledge to eco-friendly diets respond more effectively to a nudge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article (and paper) by Sanchayan Banerjee: “We appreciate the incredible array of global cuisines available to us. Despite the increasing prices, we enjoy a wide variety of food options, including an abundance of meats that our grandparents could only dream of, given their limited access. However, this diverse culinary landscape comes with a price – the current food choices significantly contribute to carbon emissions and conflict with our climate objectives. Therefore, transitioning towards more eco-friendly diets is crucial.

Instead of imposing strict measures or raising costs, researchers have employed subtle “nudges”, those that gently steer individuals toward socially beneficial choices, to reduce meat consumption. These nudges aim to modify how food choices are presented to consumers without imposing choices on them. Nevertheless, expanding the use of these nudges has proven to be a complex task in general, as it sometimes raises ethical concerns about whether people are fully aware of the messages encouraging them to change their behaviour. In the context of diets which are personal, researchers have argued nudging can be ethically dubious. What business do we have in telling people what to eat?

To address these challenges, a novel approach in behavioral science, known as “nudge+”, can empower individuals to reflect on their choices and encourage meaningful shifts towards more environmentally friendly behaviours. A nudge+ is a combination of a nudge with an encouragement to think…(More)”.

Gender Reboot: Reprogramming Gender Rights in the Age of AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Eleonore Fournier-Tombs: “This book explores gender norms and women’s rights in the age of AI. The author examines how gender dynamics have evolved in the spheres of work, self-image and safety, and education, and how these might be reflected in current challenges in AI development. The book also explores opportunities in AI to address issues facing women, and how we might harness current technological developments for gender equality. Taking a narrative tone, the book is interwoven with stories and a reflection on the raising young children during the COVID-19 pandemic. It includes both expert and personal interviews to create a nuanced and multidimensional perspective on the state of women’s rights and what might be done to move forward…(More)”.

From Data to Decision Intelligence: The Potential of Decision Accelerator Labs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stefaan G. Verhulst: “We live at a moment of perhaps unprecedented global upheaval. From climate change to pandemics, from war to political disharmony, misinformation, and growing social inequality, policy and social change-makers today face not only new challenges but new types of challenges. In our increasingly complex and interconnected world, existing systems and institutions of governance, marked by hierarchical decision-making, are increasingly being replaced by overlapping nodes of multi-sector decision-making.

Data is proving critical to these new forms of decision-making, along with associated (and emerging) phenomena such as advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Yet while the importance of data intelligence for policymakers is now widely recognized, there remain multiple challenges to operationalizing that insight–i.e., to move from data intelligence to decision intelligence.

DALL-E generated

In what follows, we explain what we mean by decision intelligence, and discuss why it matters. We then present six obstacles to better decision intelligence–challenges that prevent policymakers and others from translating insights into action. Finally, we end by offering one possible solution to these challenges: the concept of decision accelerator labs, operating on a hub and spoke model, and offering an innovative, interdisciplinary platform to facilitate the development of evidence-based, targeted solutions to public problems and dilemmas…(More)”.

The Good and Bad of Anticipating Migration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Sara Marcucci, Stefaan Verhulst, María Esther Cervantes, Elena Wüllhorst: “This blog is the first in a series that will be published weekly, dedicated to exploring innovative anticipatory methods for migration policy. Over the coming weeks, we will delve into various aspects of these methods, delving into their value, challenges, taxonomy, and practical applications. 

This first blog serves as an exploration of the value proposition and challenges inherent in innovative anticipatory methods for migration policy. We delve into the various reasons why these methods hold promise for informing more resilient, and proactive migration policies. These reasons include evidence-based policy development, enabling policymakers to ground their decisions in empirical evidence and future projections. Decision-takers, users, and practitioners can benefit from anticipatory methods for policy evaluation and adaptation, resource allocation, the identification of root causes, and the facilitation of humanitarian aid through early warning systems. However, it’s vital to acknowledge the challenges associated with the adoption and implementation of these methods, ranging from conceptual concerns such as fossilization, unfalsifiability, and the legitimacy of preemptive intervention, to practical issues like interdisciplinary collaboration, data availability and quality, capacity building, and stakeholder engagement. As we navigate through these complexities, we aim to shed light on the potential and limitations of anticipatory methods in the context of migration policy, setting the stage for deeper explorations in the coming blogs of this series…(More)”.

Deliberation is no silver bullet for the ‘problem’ of populism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Kristof Jacobs: “Populists are not satisfied with the way democracy works nowadays. They do not reject liberal democracy outright, but want it to change. Indeed, they feel the political elite is unresponsive. Not surprisingly, then, populist parties thrive in settings where there is widespread feeling that politicians do not listen to the people.

What if… decision-makers gave citizens a voice in the decision-making process? In fact, this is happening across the globe. Democratic innovations, that is: decision-making processes that aim to deepen citizens’ participation and engagement in political decision-making, are ever more popular. They come in many shapes and forms, such as referendums, deliberative mini-publics or participatory budgeting. Deliberative democratic innovations in particular are popular, as is evidenced by the many nation-level citizens’ assemblies on climate change. We have seen such assemblies not only in France, but also in the UK, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Spain and Austria.

Several prominent scholars of deliberation contend that deliberation promotes considered judgment and counteracts populism

Scholars of deliberation are optimistic about the potential of such deliberative events. In one often-cited piece in Science, several prominent scholars of deliberation contend that ‘[d]eliberation promotes considered judgment and counteracts populism’.

But is that optimism warranted? What does the available empirical research tell us? To examine this, one must distinguish between populist citizens and populist parties…(More)”.

How ChatGPT and other AI tools could disrupt scientific publishing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Gemma Conroy: “When radiologist Domenico Mastrodicasa finds himself stuck while writing a research paper, he turns to ChatGPT, the chatbot that produces fluent responses to almost any query in seconds. “I use it as a sounding board,” says Mastrodicasa, who is based at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. “I can produce a publication-ready manuscript much faster.”

Mastrodicasa is one of many researchers experimenting with generative artificial-intelligence (AI) tools to write text or code. He pays for ChatGPT Plus, the subscription version of the bot based on the large language model (LLM) GPT-4, and uses it a few times a week. He finds it particularly useful for suggesting clearer ways to convey his ideas. Although a Nature survey suggests that scientists who use LLMs regularly are still in the minority, many expect that generative AI tools will become regular assistants for writing manuscripts, peer-review reports and grant applications.

Those are just some of the ways in which AI could transform scientific communication and publishing. Science publishers are already experimenting with generative AI in scientific search tools and for editing and quickly summarizing papers. Many researchers think that non-native English speakers could benefit most from these tools. Some see generative AI as a way for scientists to rethink how they interrogate and summarize experimental results altogether — they could use LLMs to do much of this work, meaning less time writing papers and more time doing experiments…(More)”.

The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alex de Vries: “Throughout 2022 and 2023, artificial intelligence (AI) has witnessed a period of rapid expansion and extensive, large-scale application. Prominent tech companies such as Alphabet and Microsoft significantly increased their support for AI in 2023, influenced by the successful launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a conversational generative AI chatbot that reached 100 million users in an unprecedented 2 months. In response, Microsoft and Alphabet introduced their own chatbots, Bing Chat and Bard, respectively.

 This accelerated development raises concerns about the electricity consumption and potential environmental impact of AI and data centers. In recent years, data center electricity consumption has accounted for a relatively stable 1% of global electricity use, excluding cryptocurrency mining. Between 2010 and 2018, global data center electricity consumption may have increased by only 6%.

 There is increasing apprehension that the computational resources necessary to develop and maintain AI models and applications could cause a surge in data centers’ contribution to global electricity consumption.

This commentary explores initial research on AI electricity consumption and assesses the potential implications of widespread AI technology adoption on global data center electricity use. The piece discusses both pessimistic and optimistic scenarios and concludes with a cautionary note against embracing either extreme…(More)”.

The Dead Internet To Come

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Robert Mariani: “On an ordinary morning, you cradle a steaming cup of coffee while scrolling through your social media feeds. You’re in your happy place, engaging with the thoughts and creations of countless individuals at your leisure.

But something feels off. There’s no proof, but your instincts are sure of it. For a while now, the microcelebrities on Twitter have been engaging with you more than they should be, more than they were a few months ago. You’ve noticed patterns in conversations that are beyond your conscious mind’s power to decipher; there’s a rhythm to trends and replies that did not exist before.

A vague dread grips you. Why is everything a little bit different now? The smallest details are wrong. Your favorite posters have vanished from all platforms. There haven’t been any new memes for some time, only recycled iterations of old ones. Influencers are coordinated in their talking points like puppets being pulled by the same strings. Your favorite niche YouTuber has only recently been posting new content with any regularity. Is this a message? Is this what schizophrenia is like?

Dread gives way to the cold stab of terrible certainty as it hits you: they aren’t people. They’re bots. The Internet is all bots. Under your nose, the Internet of real people has gradually shifted into a digital world of shadow puppets. They look like people, they act like people, but there are no people left. Well, there’s you and maybe a few others, but you can’t tell the difference, because the bots wear a million masks. You might be alone, and have been for a while. It’s a horror worse than blindness: the certainty that your vision is clear but there is no genuine world to be seen.

This is the world of the Internet after about 2016 — at least according to the Dead Internet Theory, whose defining description appeared in an online forum in 2021.The theory suggests a conspiracy to gaslight the entire world by replacing the user-powered Internet with an empty, AI-powered one populated by bot impostors. It explains why all the cool people get banned, why Internet culture has become so stale, why the top influencers are the worst ones, and why discourse cycles seem so mechanically uniform. The perpetrators are the usual suspects: the U.S. government trying to control public opinion and corporations trying to get us to buy more stuff…(More)”.

The contested role of AI ethics boards in smart societies: a step towards improvement based on board composition by sortition

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ludovico Giacomo Conti & Peter Seele: “The recent proliferation of AI scandals led private and public organisations to implement new ethics guidelines, introduce AI ethics boards, and list ethical principles. Nevertheless, some of these efforts remained a façade not backed by any substantive action. Such behaviour made the public question the legitimacy of the AI industry and prompted scholars to accuse the sector of ethicswashing, machinewashing, and ethics trivialisation—criticisms that spilt over to institutional AI ethics boards. To counter this widespread issue, contributions in the literature have proposed fixes that do not consider its systemic character and are based on a top-down, expert-centric governance. To fill this gap, we propose to make use of qualified informed lotteries: a two-step model that transposes the documented benefits of the ancient practice of sortition into the selection of AI ethics boards’ members and combines them with the advantages of a stakeholder-driven, participative, and deliberative bottom-up process typical of Citizens’ Assemblies. The model permits increasing the public’s legitimacy and participation in the decision-making process and its deliverables, curbing the industry’s over-influence and lobbying, and diminishing the instrumentalisation of ethics boards. We suggest that this sortition-based approach may provide a sound base for both public and private organisations in smart societies for constructing a decentralised, bottom-up, participative digital democracy…(More)”.

Generative AI, Jobs, and Policy Response

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by the Global Partnership on AI: “Generative AI and the Future of Work remains notably absent from the global AI governance dialogue. Given the transformative potential of this technology in the workplace, this oversight suggests a significant gap, especially considering the substantial implications this technology has for workers, economies and society at large. As interest grows in the effects of Generative AI on occupations, debates centre around roles being replaced or enhanced by technology. Yet there is an incognita, the “Big Unknown”, an important number of workers whose future depends on decisions yet to be made
In this brief, recent articles about the topic are surveyed with special attention to the “Big Unknown”. It is not a marginal number: nearly 9% of the workforce, or 281 million workers worldwide, are in this category. Unlike previous AI developments which focused on automating narrow tasks, Generative AI models possess the scope, versatility, and economic viability to impact jobs across multiple industries and at varying skill levels. Their ability to produce human-like outputs in areas like language, content creation and customer interaction, combined with rapid advancement and low deployment costs, suggest potential near-term impacts that are much broader and more abrupt than prior waves of AI. Governments, companies, and social partners should aim to minimize any potential negative effects from Generative AI technology in the world of work, as well as harness potential opportunities to support productivity growth and decent work. This brief presents concrete policy recommendations at the global and local level. These insights, are aimed to guide the discourse towards a balanced and fair integration of Generative AI in our professional landscape To navigate this uncertain landscape and ensure that the benefits of Generative AI are equitably distributed, we recommend 10 policy actions that could serve as a starting point for discussion and implementation…(More)”.