Data and Democracy at Work: Advanced Information Technologies, Labor Law, and the New Working Class

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Brishen Rogers: “As our economy has shifted away from industrial production and service industries have become dominant, many of the nation’s largest employers are now in fields like retail, food service, logistics, and hospitality. These companies have turned to data-driven surveillance technologies that operate over a vast distance, enabling cheaper oversight of massive numbers of workers. Data and Democracy at Work argues that companies often use new data-driven technologies as a power resource—or even a tool of class domination—and that our labor laws allow them to do so.

Employers have established broad rights to use technology to gather data on workers and their performance, to exclude others from accessing that data, and to use that data to refine their managerial strategies. Through these means, companies have suppressed workers’ ability to organize and unionize, thereby driving down wages and eroding working conditions. Labor law today encourages employer dominance in many ways—but labor law can also be reformed to become a tool for increased equity. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent Great Resignation have indicated an increased political mobilization of the so-called essential workers of the pandemic, many of them service industry workers. This book describes the necessary legal reforms to increase workers’ associational power and democratize workplace data, establishing more balanced relationships between workers and employers and ensuring a brighter and more equitable future for us all…(More)”.

Am I Normal? The 200-Year Search for Normal People (and Why They Don’t Exist)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Sarah Chaney: “Before the 19th century, the term ’normal’ was rarely ever associated with human behaviour. Normal was a term used in maths, for right angles. People weren’t normal; triangles were.

But from the 1830s, this branch of science really took off across Europe and North America, with a proliferation of IQ tests, sex studies, a census of hallucinations – even a UK beauty map (which concluded the women in Aberdeen were “the most repellent”). This book tells the surprising history of how the very notion of the normal came about, how it shaped us all, often while entrenching oppressive values.

Sarah Chaney looks at why we’re still asking the internet: Do I have a normal body? Is my sex life normal? Are my kids normal? And along the way, she challenges why we ever thought it might be a desirable thing to be…(More)”.

The Normative Challenges of AI in Outer Space: Law, Ethics, and the Realignment of Terrestrial Standards

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ugo Pagallo, Eleonora Bassi & Massimo Durante: “The paper examines the open problems that experts of space law shall increasingly address over the next few years, according to four different sets of legal issues. Such differentiation sheds light on what is old and what is new with today’s troubles of space law, e.g., the privatization of space, vis-à-vis the challenges that AI raises in this field. Some AI challenges depend on its unique features, e.g., autonomy and opacity, and how they affect pillars of the law, whether on Earth or in space missions. The paper insists on a further class of legal issues that AI systems raise, however, only in outer space. We shall never overlook the constraints of a hazardous and hostile environment, such as on a mission between Mars and the Moon. The aim of this paper is to illustrate what is still mostly unexplored or in its infancy in this kind of research, namely, the fourfold ways in which the uniqueness of AI and that of outer space impact both ethical and legal standards. Such standards shall provide for thresholds of evaluation according to which courts and legislators evaluate the pros and cons of technology. Our claim is that a new generation of sui generis standards of space law, stricter or more flexible standards for AI systems in outer space, down to the “principle of equality” between human standards and robotic standards, will follow as a result of this twofold uniqueness of AI and of outer space…(More)”.

The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Henry Farrell and Marion Fourcade: “While people in and around the tech industry debate whether algorithms are political at all, social scientists take the politics as a given, asking instead how this politics unfolds: how algorithms concretely govern. What we call “high-tech modernism”—the application of machine learning algorithms to organize our social, economic, and political life—has a dual logic. On the one hand, like traditional bureaucracy, it is an engine of classification, even if it categorizes people and things very differently. On the other, like the market, it provides a means of self-adjusting allocation, though its feedback loops work differently from the price system. Perhaps the most important consequence of high-tech modernism for the contemporary moral political economy is how it weaves hierarchy and data-gathering into the warp and woof of everyday life, replacing visible feedback loops with invisible ones, and suggesting that highly mediated outcomes are in fact the unmediated expression of people’s own true wishes…(More)”.

Protecting the integrity of survey research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, et al: “Although polling is not irredeemably broken, changes in technology and society create challenges that, if not addressed well, can threaten the quality of election polls and other important surveys on topics such as the economy. This essay describes some of these challenges and recommends remediations to protect the integrity of all kinds of survey research, including election polls. These 12 recommendations specify ways that survey researchers, and those who use polls and other public-oriented surveys, can increase the accuracy and trustworthiness of their data and analyses. Many of these recommendations align practice with the scientific norms of transparency, clarity, and self-correction. The transparency recommendations focus on improving disclosure of factors that affect the nature and quality of survey data. The clarity recommendations call for more precise use of terms such as “representative sample” and clear description of survey attributes that can affect accuracy. The recommendation about correcting the record urges the creation of a publicly available, professionally curated archive of identified technical problems and their remedies. The paper also calls for development of better benchmarks and for additional research on the effects of panel conditioning. Finally, the authors suggest ways to help people who want to use or learn from survey research understand the strengths and limitations of surveys and distinguish legitimate and problematic uses of these methods…(More)”.

The Incredible Challenge of Counting Every Global Birth and Death

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeneen Interlandi at The New York Times: “…The world’s wealthiest nations are awash in so much personal data that data theft has become a lucrative business and its protection a common concern. From such a vantage point, it can be difficult to even fathom the opposite — a lack of any identifying information at all — let alone grapple with its implications. But the undercounting of human lives is pervasive, data scientists say. The resulting ills are numerous and consequential, and recent history is littered with missed opportunities to solve the problem.

More than two decades ago, 147 nations rallied around the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations’ bold new plan for halving extreme poverty, curbing childhood mortality and conquering infectious diseases like malaria and H.I.V. The health goals became the subject of countless international summits and steady news coverage, ultimately spurring billions of dollars in investment from the world’s wealthiest nations, including the United States. But a fierce debate quickly ensued. Critics said that health officials at the United Nations and elsewhere had almost no idea what the baseline conditions were in many of the countries they were trying to help. They could not say whether maternal mortality was increasing or decreasing, or how many people were being infected with malaria, or how fast tuberculosis was spreading. In a 2004 paper, the World Health Organization’s former director of evidence, Chris Murray, and other researchers described the agency’s estimates as “serial guessing.” Without that baseline data, progress toward any given goal — to halve hunger, for example — could not be measured…(More)”.

Why Data for and about Children Needs Attention at the World Data Forum: The Vital Role of Partnerships

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Stefaan Verhulst, Eugenia Olliaro, Danzhen You, Estrella Lajom, and Daniel Shephard: “Issues surrounding children and data are rarely given the thoughtful and dedicated attention they deserve. An increasingly large amount of data is being collected about children, often without a framework to determine whether those data are used responsibly. At the same time, even as the volume of data increases, there remain substantial areas of missing data when it comes to children. This is especially true for children on the move and those who have been marginalized by conflict, displacement, or environmental disasters. There is also a risk that patterns of data collection mirror existing forms of exclusion, thereby perpetuating inequalities that exist along, for example, dimensions of indigeneity and gender.

This year’s World Data Forum, to be held in Hangzhou, China, offers an opportunity to unpack these challenges and consider solutions, such as through new forms of partnerships. The Responsible Data for Children (RD4C) initiative offers one important model for such a partnership. Formed between The GovLab and UNICEF, the initiative seeks to produce guidance, tools, and leadership to support the responsible handling of data for and about children across the globe. It addresses the unique vulnerabilities that face children, identifying shortcomings in the existing data ecology and pointing toward some possible solutions…(More)”.

Seize the Future by Harnessing the Power of Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Kriss Deiglmeier: “…Data is a form of power. And the sad reality is that power is being held increasingly by the commercial sector and not by organizations seeking to create a more just, sustainable, and prosperous world. A year into my tenure as the chief global impact officer at Splunk, I became consumed with the new era driven by data. Specifically, I was concerned with the emerging data divide, which I defined as “the disparity between the expanding use of data to create commercial value, and the comparatively weak use of data to solve social and environmental challenges.”…

To effectively address the emerging data future, the social impact sector must build an entire impact data ecosystem for this moment in time—and the next moment in time. The way to do that is by investing in those areas where we currently lag the commercial sector. Consider the following gaps:

  • Nonprofits are ill-equipped with the financial and technical resources they need to make full use of data, often due to underfunding.
  • The sector’s technical and data talent is a desert compared to the commercial sector.
  • While the sector is rich with output and service-delivery data, that data is locked away or is unusable in its current form.
  • The sector lacks living data platforms (collaboratives and data refineries) that can make use of sector-wide data in a way that helps improve service delivery, maximize impact, and create radical innovation.

The harsh realities of the sector’s disparate data skills, infrastructure, and competencies show the dire current state. For the impact sector to transition to a place of power, it must jump without hesitation into the arena of the Data Age—and invest time, talent, and money in filling in these gaps.

Regardless of our lagging position, the social sector has both an incredible opportunity and a unique capacity to drive the power of data into the emerging and unimaginable. The good news is that there’s pivotal work already happening in the sector that is making it easier to build the kind of impact data ecosystem needed to join the Data Age. The framing and terms used to describe this work are many—data for good, data science for impact, open data, public interest technology, data lakes, ethical data, and artificial intelligence ethics.

These individual pieces, while important, are not enough. To fully exploit the power of data for a more just, sustainable, and prosperous world, we need to be bold enough to build the full ecosystem and not be satisfied with piecemeal work. To do that we should begin by looking at the assets that we have and build on those.

People. There are dedicated leaders in the field of social innovation who are committed to using data for impact and who have been doing that for many years. We need to support them by investing in their work at scale. The list of people leading the way is constantly growing, but to name a few: Stefaan G. Verhulst, Joy Buolamwini, Jim Fruchterman, Katara McCarty, Geoff Mulgan, Rediet Abebe, Jason Saul, and Jake Porway….(More)”.

Data is power — it’s time we act like it

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Danil Mikhailov: “Almost 82% of NGOs in low- and middle-income countries cite a lack of funding as their biggest barrier to adopting digital tools for social impact. What’s more, data.org’s 2023 data for social impact, or DSI, report, Accelerate Aspirations: Moving Together to Achieve Systems Change, found that when it comes to financial support, funders overlook the power of advanced data strategies to address longer-term systemic solutions — instead focusing on short-term, project-based outcomes.

That’s a real problem as we look to deploy powerful, data-driven interventions to solve some of today’s biggest crises — from shifting demographics to rising inequality to pandemics to our global climate emergency. Given the urgent challenges our world faces, pilots, one-offs, and underresourced program interventions are no longer acceptable.

It’s time we — as funders, academics, and purpose-driven data practitioners — acknowledge that data is power. And how do we truly harness that power? We must look toward innovative, diverse, equitable, and collaborative funding and partnership models to meet the incredible potential of data for social impact or risk the success of systems-level solutions that lead to long-term impact…(More)”.

Law, AI, and Human Rights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by John Croker: “Technology has been at the heart of two injustices that courts have labelled significant miscarriages of justice. The first example will be familiar now to many people in the UK: colloquially known as the ‘post office’ or ‘horizon’ scandal. The second is from Australia, where the Commonwealth Government sought to utilise AI to identify overpayment in the welfare system through what is colloquially known as the ‘Robodebt System’. The first example resulted in the most widespread miscarriage of justice in the UK legal system’s history. The second example was labelled “a shameful chapter” in government administration in Australia and led to the government unlawfully asserting debts amounting to $1.763 billion against 433,000 Australians, and is now the subject of a Royal Commission seeking to identify how public policy failures could have been made on such a significant scale.

Both examples show that where technology and AI goes wrong, the scale of the injustice can result in unprecedented impacts across societies….(More)”.