Governance of the Inconceivable

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Lisa Margonelli: “How do scientists and policymakers work together to design governance for technologies that come with evolving and unknown risks? In the Winter 1985 Issues, seven experts reflected on the possibility of a large nuclear conflict triggering a “nuclear winter.” These experts agreed that the consequences would be horrifying: even beyond radiation effects, for example, burning cities could put enough smoke in the atmosphere to block sunlight, lowering ground temperatures and threatening people, crops, and other living things. In the same issue, former astronaut and then senator John Glenn wrote about the prospects for several nuclear nonproliferation agreements he was involved in negotiating. This broad discussion of nuclear weapons governance in Issues—involving legislators Glenn and then senator Al Gore as well as scientists, Department of Defense officials, and weapons designers—reflected the discourse of the time. In the culture at large, fears of nuclear annihilation became ubiquitous, and today you can easily find danceable playlists containing “38 Essential ’80s Songs About Nuclear Anxiety.”

But with the end of the Cold War, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the rapid growth of a globalized economy and culture, these conversations receded from public consciousness. Issues has not run an article on nuclear weapons since 2010, when an essay argued that exaggerated fear of nuclear weapons had led to poor policy decisions. “Albert Einstein memorably proclaimed that nuclear weapons ‘have changed everything except our way of thinking,’” wrote political scientist John Mueller. “But the weapons actually seem to have changed little except our way of thinking, as well as our ways of declaiming, gesticulating, deploying military forces, and spending lots of money.”

All these old conversations suddenly became relevant again as our editorial team worked on this issue. On February 27, when Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s nuclear weapons put on “high alert” after invading Ukraine, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres declared that “the mere idea of a nuclear conflict is simply unconceivable.” But, in the space of a day, what had long seemed inconceivable was suddenly being very actively conceived….(More)”.

How Smart Tech Tried to Solve the Mental Health Crisis and Only Made It Worse

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Emma Bedor Hiland: “Crisis Text Line was supposed to be the exception. Skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, and mental distress over the last decade demanded new, innovative solutions. The non-profit organization was founded in 2013 with the mission of providing free mental health text messaging services and crisis intervention tools. It seemed like the right moment to use technology to make the world a better place. Over the following years, the accolades and praise the platform received reflected its success. But their sterling reputation was tarnished overnight at the beginning of 2022 when Politico published an investigation into the way Crisis Text Line had handled and shared user data. The problem with the organization, however, goes well beyond its alleged mishandling of user information.

Despite Crisis Text Line’s assurance that its platform was anonymous, Politico’s January report showed that the company’s private messaging sessions were not actually anonymous. Data about users, including what they shared with Crisis Text Line’s volunteers, had been provided and sold to an entirely different company called Loris.ai, a tech startup that specializes in artificial intelligence software for human resources and customer service. The report brought to light a troubling relationship between the two organizations. Both had previously been headed by the same CEO, Nancy Lublin. In 2019, however, Lublin had stepped down from Loris, and in 2020 Crisis Text Line’s board ousted her following allegations that she had engaged in workplace racism.

But the troubles that enveloped Crisis Text Line can’t be blamed on one bad apple. Crisis Text Line’s board of directors had approved the relationship between the entities. In the technology and big data sectors, commodification of user data is fundamental to a platform or toolset’s economic survival, and by sharing data with Loris.ai, Crisis Text Line was able to provide needed services. The harsh reality revealed by the Politico report was that even mental healthcare is not immune from commodification, despite the risks of aggregating and sharing information about experiences and topics which continue to be stigmatized.

In the case of the Crisis Text Line-Loris.ai partnership, Loris used the nonprofit’s data to improve its own, for-profit development of machine learning algorithms sold to corporations and governments. Although Crisis Text Line maintains that all of the data shared with Loris was anonymized, the transactional nature of the relationship between the two was still fundamentally an economic one. As the Loris.ai website states, “Crisis Text Line is a Loris shareholder. Our success offers material benefit to CTL, helping this non-profit organization continue its important work. We believe this model is a blueprint for ways for-profit companies can infuse social good into their culture and operations, and for nonprofits to prosper.”…(More)”.

A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Steven Johnson at the New York Times: “You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold winter’s night. Perhaps you have a mug of tea in hand, perhaps something stronger. You open a magazine to an article you’ve been meaning to read. The title suggested a story about a promising — but also potentially dangerous — new technology on the cusp of becoming mainstream, and after reading only a few sentences, you find yourself pulled into the story. A revolution is coming in machine intelligence, the author argues, and we need, as a society, to get better at anticipating its consequences. But then the strangest thing happens: You notice that the writer has, seemingly deliberately, omitted the very last word of the first .

The missing word jumps into your consciousness almost unbidden: ‘‘the very last word of the first paragraph.’’ There’s no sense of an internal search query in your mind; the word ‘‘paragraph’’ just pops out. It might seem like second nature, this filling-in-the-blank exercise, but doing it makes you think of the embedded layers of knowledge behind the thought. You need a command of the spelling and syntactic patterns of English; you need to understand not just the dictionary definitions of words but also the ways they relate to one another; you have to be familiar enough with the high standards of magazine publishing to assume that the missing word is not just a typo, and that editors are generally loath to omit key words in published pieces unless the author is trying to be clever — perhaps trying to use the missing word to make a point about your cleverness, how swiftly a human speaker of English can conjure just the right word.

Before you can pursue that idea further, you’re back into the article, where you find the author has taken you to a building complex in suburban Iowa. Inside one of the buildings lies a wonder of modern technology: 285,000 CPU cores yoked together into one giant supercomputer, powered by solar arrays and cooled by industrial fans. The machines never sleep: Every second of every day, they churn through innumerable calculations, using state-of-the-art techniques in machine intelligence that go by names like ‘‘stochastic gradient descent’’ and ‘‘convolutional neural networks.’’ The whole system is believed to be one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet.

And what, you may ask, is this computational dynamo doing with all these prodigious resources? Mostly, it is playing a kind of game, over and over again, billions of times a second. And the game is called: Guess what the missing word is.…(More)”.

Police surveillance and facial recognition: Why data privacy is an imperative for communities of color

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nicol Turner Lee and Caitlin Chin: “Governments and private companies have a long history of collecting data from civilians, often justifying the resulting loss of privacy in the name of national security, economic stability, or other societal benefits. But it is important to note that these trade-offs do not affect all individuals equally. In fact, surveillance and data collection have disproportionately affected communities of color under both past and current circumstances and political regimes.

From the historical surveillance of civil rights leaders by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to the current misuse of facial recognition technologies, surveillance patterns often reflect existing societal biases and build upon harmful and virtuous cycles. Facial recognition and other surveillance technologies also enable more precise discrimination, especially as law enforcement agencies continue to make misinformed, predictive decisions around arrest and detainment that disproportionately impact marginalized populations.

In this paper, we present the case for stronger federal privacy protections with proscriptive guardrails for the public and private sectors to mitigate the high risks that are associated with the development and procurement of surveillance technologies. We also discuss the role of federal agencies in addressing the purposes and uses of facial recognition and other monitoring tools under their jurisdiction, as well as increased training for state and local law enforcement agencies to prevent the unfair or inaccurate profiling of people of color. We conclude the paper with a series of proposals that lean either toward clear restrictions on the use of surveillance technologies in certain contexts, or greater accountability and oversight mechanisms, including audits, policy interventions, and more inclusive technical designs….(More)”

Blockchain: Novel Provenance Applications

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

CRS Report by Kristen E. Busch: “Blockchain, generally, is a database technology that records and stores information in blocks of data that are linked, or “chained,” together. Data stored on a blockchain are continually shared, replicated, and synchronized across the nodes in a network—individual computer systems or specialized hardware that communicate with each other and store and process information. This system enables tamper-resistant record keeping without a centralized authority or intermediary.

There are multiple types of blockchains, and, depending on the type, recorded data may be accessible to all users or only a designated subset. All blockchains share common characteristics, including decentralization (i.e., no centralized authority), immutability (i.e., the blockchain records are unalterable), and pseudonymity (i.e., how users’ real-world identities are handled). Certain blockchain types may offer greater levels of decentralization and pseudonymity than others. New blockchain applications, such as smart contracts, non-fungible tokens, and decentralization autonomous organizations, may automate processes or replace intermediaries in a variety of fields. Recent developments in blockchain governance protocols and consensus mechanisms have raised concerns about the environmental impact, oversight, and accountability of blockchain networks…

The United States is a hub for private-sector blockchain development, and many states and federal agencies are experimenting with novel blockchain provenance applications,including the Food and Drug Administration and Department of Treasury. Proponents claim that blockchain can increase transparency and efficiency in many fields by enabling auditable and immutable recordkeeping. However, there are equally significant concerns.

Blockchain technologies are maturing and fully developed use cases outside of the financial sector are relatively limited. In some applications, blockchain technologies can add unnecessary complexity compared with using conventional databases or other alternatives. The technology may also pose security and privacy risks if sensitive information is permanently recorded on a blockchain, encryption algorithms are broken, smart contracts malfunction, or digital wallets and other blockchain applications are hacked.

Some blockchains also use energy-intensive processes to validate transactions, which can consume as much energy as small nations. Individual states have passed legislation or established initiatives to develop, incentivize, and regulate blockchain technologies. Some states have taken vastly different approaches to blockchain technologies, so the state-level regulations that do exist vary widely. A handful of federal agencies have released guidance on blockchain technologies in specific sectors, such as finance, but there is little guidance for blockchain applications in other fields, such supply chain logistics, identity credentialing, or intellectual property and asset registration. In the meantime, China and the European Union have invested heavily in blockchain technologies and developed their own respective regulatory frameworks, so international regulations may also conflict with one another…(More)”.

A Vision and Roadmap for Education Statistics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by he National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “The education landscape in the United States has been changing rapidly in recent decades: student populations have become more diverse; there has been an explosion of data sources; there is an intensified focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility; educators and policy makers at all levels want more and better data for evidence-based decision making; and the role of technology in education has increased dramatically. With awareness of this changed landscape the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to provide a vision for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)—the nation’s premier statistical agency for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating statistics at all levels of education.

A Vision and Roadmap for Education Statistics (2022) reviews developments in using alternative data sources, considers recent trends and future priorities, and suggests changes to NCES’s programs and operations, with a focus on NCES’s statistical programs. The report reimagines NCES as a leader in the 21st century education data ecosystem, where it can meet the growing demands for policy-relevant statistical analyses and data to more effectively and efficiently achieve its mission, especially in light of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 and the 2021 Presidential Executive Order on advancing racial equity. The report provides strategic advice for NCES in all aspects of the agency’s work including modernization, stakeholder engagement, and the resources necessary to complete its mission and meet the current and future challenges in education…(More)”.

The Food Aid Delivery App

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Trish Bendix: “Between 30 and 40 percent of the US food supply goes to waste each year. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nearly 80 billion pounds of food end up in landfills annually. This figure takes on a greater significance in the context of another food crisis: food insecurity. More than 10 percent of US households are food insecure, and the nonprofit Feeding America reports that this number will increase due to the economic and unemployment consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The food waste crisis is not new. Wasted, a 2012 report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, recorded Americans’ annual food waste at 40 percent. Horrified by the report’s findings, Leah Lizarondo, a food and health advocate who began her career working in consumer-packaged goods and technology, was inspired to find a solution.

“I tried to figure out why this inefficiency was happening—where the failing was in the supply chain,” Lizarondo says. She knew that consumer-facing businesses such as grocery stores and restaurants were the second-biggest culprits of food waste—behind American households. And even though these businesses didn’t intend to waste food, they lacked the logistics, structures, or incentives to redirect the food surplus to people experiencing food insecurity. Furthermore, because most wasted food is perishable, traditional waste methods didn’t work within the food-banking structure.

“It was so cheap to just throw food in a landfill,” Lizarondo comments. “There’s no legislation [in the United States] that prevents us from doing that, unlike other countries.” For example, France banned food waste in 2016, while Norway has stores that sell food past their sell-by dates, and Asian countries like Japan and South Korea have adopted their own regulations, including the latter charging a fee to citizens for each pound of food waste. Currently, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont are the only US states with legislation enforcing organic waste bans.

In 2016, Lizarondo launched the nonprofit Food Rescue Hero, a technology platform that redirects food waste to the food insecure in cities across America.

Since its launch, Food Rescue Hero has given more than 68 million pounds of food to people in need. Currently, it operates in 12 cities in the United States and Canada, with more than 22,000 drivers volunteering their time….(More)”.

How Cities Are Using Digital Twins Like a SimCity for Policymakers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Linda Poon: “The entire 40-square-mile metro region of Orlando, Florida, may soon live virtually inside the offices of the Orlando Economic Partnership (OEP). The group has partnered with the gaming company Unity to develop a 3-D model of the area — from its downtown core all the way out to Space Coast on the eastern edge of central Florida — that the city can show off to potential investors in its bid to grow as a tech hub.

“It’ll be a circular room with LED screens kind of 180 degrees,” says OEP President and Chief Executive Officer Tim Giuliani.“Then in the middle, we’re planning the holographic image, where the digital twin of the region will come to life.” 

Orlando’s planned showcase is one of the flashier uses of a new technology that’s being lauded as a potential game changer for urban planning. Like a SimCity for policymakers, digital twins allow cities not just to create virtual models, but to run simulations of new policies or infrastructure projects and preview their potential impacts before making a decision in the real world. 

They may be also one of the more tangible opportunities for cities in the race for the so-called metaverse, an immersive network of virtual worlds that some leaders believe to be the future of urban living. Using 3-D mapping and analysis of static and real-time data, municipalities and businesses are increasingly adopting digital twin technology — although many of its potential uses remain aspirational thus far. 

Orlando expects to use its digital twin technology for more than virtual tours. It also hopes to preview how different investments, like a transit system upgrade, might affect the built environment and its residents. Several other U.S. cities are building replicas to model traffic congestion strategies and drive net-zero climate goals. Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York and Phoenix are all building out digital twins to lower building emissions as part of the Clean Cities Clean Future campaign from the software company Cityzenith. Globally, cities from Singapore to Helsinki and Dubai are also investing in the technology, with goals ranging from driving sustainability to promoting virtual tourism. 

The technology could help officials cut operating costs and carbon emissions of new construction, and avoid costly modifications after a project is completed. Amid an ever-looming climate crisis facing urban areas, it could enable cities to test the effectiveness of various measures against rising sea levels and urban heat. By one estimate, digital twins could save cities some $280 billion by 2030….(More)”

Trust the Science But Do Your Research: A Comment on the Unfortunate Revival of the Progressive Case for the Administrative State

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Mark Tushnet: “…offers a critique of one Progressive argument for the administrative state, that it would base policies on what disinterested scientific inquiries showed would best advance the public good and flexibly respond to rapidly changing technological, economic, and social conditions. The critique draws on recent scholarship in the field of Science and Technology Studies, which argues that what counts as a scientific fact is the product of complex social, political, and other processes. The critique is deployed in an analysis of the responses of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Food and Drug Administration to some important aspects of the COVD crisis in 2020.

A summary of the overall argument is this: The COVID virus had characteristics that made it exceptionally difficult to develop policies that would significantly limit its spread until a vaccine was available, and some of those characteristics went directly to the claim that the administrative state could respond flexibly to rapidly changing conditions. But, and here is where the developing critique of claims about scientific expertise enters, the relevant administrative agencies were bureaucracies with scientific staff members, and what those bureaucracies regard as “the science” was shaped in part by bureaucratic and political considerations, and the parts that were so shaped were important components of the overall policy response.

Part II describes policy-relevant characteristics of knowledge about the COVID virus and explains why those characteristics made it quite difficult for more than a handful of democratic nations to adopt policies that would effectively limit its penetration of their populations. Part III begins with a short presentation of the aspects of the STS critique of claims about disinterested science that have some bearing on policy responses to the pandemic. It then provides an examination shaped by that critique of the structures of the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, showing how those structural features contributed to policy failures. Part IV concludes by sketching how the STS critique might inform efforts to reconstruct rather than deconstruct the administrative state, proposing the creation of Citizen Advisory Panels in science-based agencies…(More)”.

Public Meetings Thwart Housing Reform Where It Is Needed Most

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview with Katherine Levine Einstein by Jake Blumgart: “Public engagement can have downsides. Neighborhood participation in the housing permitting process makes existing political inequalities worse, limits housing supply and contributes to the affordability crisis….

In 2019, Katherine Levine Einstein and her co-authors at Boston University produced the first in-depth study of this dynamic, Neighborhood Defenders, providing a unique insight into how hyper-local democracy can produce warped land-use outcomes. Governing talked with her about the politics of delay, what kind of regulations hamper growth and when community meetings can still be an effective means of public feedback.

Governing: What could be wrong with a neighborhood meeting? Isn’t this democracy in its purest form? 

Katherine Levine Einstein: In this book, rather than look at things in their ideal form, we actually evaluated how they are working on the ground. We bring data to the question of whether neighborhood meetings are really providing community voice. One of the reasons that we think of them as this important cornerstone of American democracy is because they are supposedly providing us perspectives that are not widely heard, really amplifying the voices of neighborhood residents.

What we’re able to do in the book is to really bring home the idea that the people who are showing up are not actually representative of their broader communities and they are unrepresentative in really important ways. They’re much more likely to be opposed to new housing, and they’re demographically privileged on a number of dimensions….

What we find happens in practice is that even in less privileged places, these neighborhood meetings are actually amplifying more privileged voices. We study a variety of more disadvantaged places and what the dynamics of these meetings look like. The principles that hold in more affluent communities still play out in these less privileged places. You still hear from voices that are overwhelmingly opposed to new housing. The voices that are heard are much more likely to be homeowners, white and older…(More)”.