The Future of Compute

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Independent Review by a UK Expert Panel: “…Compute is a material part of modern life. It is among the critical technologies lying behind innovation, economic growth and scientific discoveries. Compute improves our everyday lives. It underpins all the tools, services and information we hold on our handheld devices – from search engines and social media, to streaming services and accurate weather forecasts. This technology may be invisible to the public, but life today would be very different without it.

Sectors across the UK economy, both new and old, are increasingly reliant upon compute. By leveraging the capability that compute provides, businesses of all sizes can extract value from the enormous quantity of data created every day; reduce the cost and time required for research and development (R&D); improve product design; accelerate decision making processes; and increase overall efficiency. Compute also enables advancements in transformative technologies, such as AI, which themselves lead to the creation of value and innovation across the economy. This all translates into higher productivity and profitability for businesses and robust economic growth for the UK as a whole.

Compute powers modelling, simulations, data analysis and scenario planning, and thereby enables researchers to develop new drugs; find new energy sources; discover new materials; mitigate the effects of climate change; and model the spread of pandemics. Compute is required to tackle many of today’s global challenges and brings invaluable benefits to our society.

Compute’s effects on society and the economy have already been and, crucially, will continue to be transformative. The scale of compute capabilities keeps accelerating at pace. The performance of the world’s fastest compute has grown by a factor of 626 since 2010. The compute requirements of the largest machine learning models has grown 10 billion times over the last 10 years. We expect compute demand to significantly grow as compute capability continues to increase. Technology today operates very differently to 10 years ago and, in a decade’s time, it will have changed once again.

Yet, despite compute’s value to the economy and society, the UK lacks a long-term vision for compute…(More)”.

The Expanding Use of Technology to Manage Migration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by ​Marti Flacks , Erol Yayboke , Lauren Burke and Anastasia Strouboulis: “Seeking to manage growing flows of migrants, the United States and European Union have dramatically expanded their engagement with migration origin and transit countries. This increasingly includes supporting the deployment of sophisticated technology to understand, monitor, and influence the movement of people across borders, expanding the spheres of interest to include the movement of people long before they reach U.S. and European borders.

This report from the CSIS Human Rights Initiative and CSIS Project on Fragility and Mobility examines two case studies of migration—one from Central America toward the United States and one from West and North Africa toward Europe—to map the use and export of migration management technologies and the associated human rights risks. Authors Marti Flacks, Erol Yayboke, Lauren Burke, and Anastasia Strouboulis provide recommendations for origin, transit, and destination governments on how to incorporate human rights considerations into their decisionmaking on the use of technology to manage migration…(More)”.

Foresight is a messy methodology but a marvellous mindset

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Berta Mizsei: “…From my first few forays into foresight, it seemed that it employed desk research and expert workshops, but refrained from the use of data and from testing the solidity of assumptions. This can make scenarios weak and anecdotal, something experts justify by stating that scenarios are meant to be a ‘first step to start a discussion’.

The deficiencies of foresight became more evident when I took part in the process – so much of what ends up in imagined narratives depends on whether an expert was chatty during a workshop, or on the background of the expert writing the scenario.

As a young researcher coming from a quantitative background, this felt alien and alarming.

However, as it turns out, my issue was not with foresight per se, but rather with a certain way of doing it, one that is insufficiently grounded in sound research methods. In short, I am disturbed by ‘bad’ foresight. Foresight’s newly-found popularity means that there is more demand than supply for foresight experts, thus the prevalence of questionable foresight methodology has increased – something that was discussed during a dedicated session at this year’s Ideas Lab (CEPS’ flagship annual event).

One culprit is the Commission. Its foresight relies heavily on ‘backcasting’, a planning method that starts with a desirable future and works backwards to identify ways to achieve that outcome. One example is the 2022 Strategic Foresight Report ‘Twinning the green and digital transitions in the new geopolitical context’ that mapped out ways to get to the ideal future the Commission cabinet had imagined.

Is this useful? Undoubtedly.

However, it is also single-mindedly deterministic about the future of environmental policy, which is both notoriously complex and of critical importance to the current Commission. Similar hubris (or malpractice) is evident across various EU apparatuses – policymakers have a clear vision of what they want to happen and they invest into figuring out how to make that a reality without admitting how turbulent and unpredictable the future is. This is commendable and politically advantageous… but it is not foresight.

It misses one of foresight’s main virtues: forcing us to consider alternative futures…(More)”.

Innovation Power: Why Technology Will Define the Future of Geopolitics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Eric Schmidt: “When Russian forces marched on Kyiv in February 2022, few thought Ukraine could survive. Russia had more than twice as many soldiers as Ukraine. Its military budget was more than ten times as large. The U.S. intelligence community estimated that Kyiv would fall within one to two weeks at most.

Outgunned and outmanned, Ukraine turned to one area in which it held an advantage over the enemy: technology. Shortly after the invasion, the Ukrainian government uploaded all its critical data to the cloud, so that it could safeguard information and keep functioning even if Russian missiles turned its ministerial offices into rubble. The country’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had established just two years earlier, repurposed its e-government mobile app, Diia, for open-source intelligence collection, so that citizens could upload photos and videos of enemy military units. With their communications infrastructure in jeopardy, the Ukrainians turned to Starlink satellites and ground stations provided by SpaceX to stay connected. When Russia sent Iranian-made drones across the border, Ukraine acquired its own drones specially designed to intercept their attacks—while its military learned how to use unfamiliar weapons supplied by Western allies. In the cat-and-mouse game of innovation, Ukraine simply proved nimbler. And so what Russia had imagined would be a quick and easy invasion has turned out to be anything but.

Ukraine’s success can be credited in part to the resolve of the Ukrainian people, the weakness of the Russian military, and the strength of Western support. But it also owes to the defining new force of international politics: innovation power. Innovation power is the ability to invent, adopt, and adapt new technologies. It contributes to both hard and soft power. High-tech weapons systems increase military might, new platforms and the standards that govern them provide economic leverage, and cutting-edge research and technologies enhance global appeal. There is a long tradition of states harnessing innovation to project power abroad, but what has changed is the self-perpetuating nature of scientific advances. Developments in artificial intelligence in particular not only unlock new areas of scientific discovery; they also speed up that very process. Artificial intelligence supercharges the ability of scientists and engineers to discover ever more powerful technologies, fostering advances in artificial intelligence itself as well as in other fields—and reshaping the world in the process…(More)”.

The Meta Oversight Board’s First Term

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Evelyn Douek: “The Meta Oversight Board was established to oversee one of the most expansive systems of speech regulation in history and to exercise independent review over “some of the most difficult and significant
content decisions” Meta makes. As a voluntary exercise in selfregulation, the Board exercises power over Meta only insofar and for as long as Meta permits it to. And yet, in its inaugural members’ first threeyear term, the Board has in many ways defied its skeptics. The Board has established itself as a regular part of conversations about content moderation governance, receiving significant academic and media attention. It has also instantiated meaningful reforms of Meta’s content moderation systems, and shed light on otherwise completely opaque decisionmaking processes within one of the world’s most powerful
speech regulators. But the Board has also consistently shied away from answering the hardest and most controversial questions that come before it—that is, the very questions it was set up to solve. Although the Board purported to evaluate Meta’s rules under international human rights law, it has almost entirely failed to engage with the necessary the normative question of how international law principles created to constrain governmental power over expression should apply to private content moderation systems. This Essay argues that the Board’s institutional incentives and desire for influence have made it prioritize consensus and simplicity over engagement with the fundamental normative questions that the quest for principled content moderation decisionmaking raises. The result is a tremendous missed opportunity that holds important lessons for the design of future content moderation oversight bodies…(More)”

What is the role of public servants and policymakers in the battle against mis- and disinformation in our democratic systems?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Elsa Pilichowski: “Recent health, economic and geopolitical crises have highlighted the urgency for governments to strengthen their capacity to respond to the spread of false and misleading information, while simultaneously building more resilient societies better prepared to handle crises. The challenges faced demand a whole-of-society-approach. 

First, governments should help citizens become more digitally literate so that they can identify false information before they spread it, intentionally or not. Increasing societal resilience also means supporting a diverse and independent media sector which can give voice to all viewpoints. Finally, new partnerships between civil society, the media, social media platforms and governments need to be built to help pre-bunk and de-bunk mis- and disinformation.

While not the ultimate actor in information provision, governments themselves will have to step up their capacities in the information space by strengthening inter-agency coordination mechanisms, developing innovative strategies and tools, and working with international partners to build knowledge of the origins and pathways of mis- and disinformation. Another specific avenue is to help ensure the role of public communication in reinforcing an information space conducive to democracy. Breaking down internal silos to facilitate collaboration; building partnerships with external stakeholders like fact-checkers; and focusing on efforts to reach all segments of society with accurate information will all be important.

Regulatory responses that help establish effective transparency frameworks around content moderation processes and decisions, build understanding of the role of algorithms in the spread of mis- and disinformation and promote a fairer and more responsible business environment are all key priorities. Such constructive and process-based regulation is all the more critical to safeguard against government interference in the free flow of information and impingement upon one of the foundational values of democracy—the right to free and open speech…(More)”

Governance for Human Social Flourishing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jenna Bednar: “Government has become something that happens to us in service of the economy rather than a vehicle driven by us to realize what we can achieve together. To save the planet and live meaningful lives, we need to start seeing one another not as competitors but as collaborators working toward shared interests. In this essay, I propose a framework for human social flourishing to foster a public policy that rebuilds our connections and care for one another. It is based on four pillars-dignity, community, beauty, and sustainability-and emphasizes not just inclusiveness but participation, and highlights the importance of policy-making at the local level in the rebuilding of prosocial norms.

By many aggregate measures, the human condition has improved spectacularly.1 Life expectancy, gdp per capita, opportunities for self-expression, and the probability of not living in poverty have all surged over the last half century. This period of remarkable advances has scaffolded a neoliberal political economy that prizes self-reliance and prosperity. Yet for all of the successes produced by the prosperity frame, it has proven incapable of meeting the challenges of climate change and bungled a pandemic response, turning what might have been a moment to celebrate scientific achievement and human commitment to care for one another into a time of greater polarization and science skepticism. Racism persists and we are unable to lift people out of lives of despair.2

These failures call into question our focus on economic prosperity metrics like gdp and the constellation of institutions that supports that goal.3 Economic prosperity has a far from perfect correlation with the less material and measurable goals that create meaningful lives: feeling needed by and belonging to a community, having purposeful work and agency in one’s life, and having opportunities to feel satisfaction and joy.

By ignoring these other dimensions, the prosperity frame creates other harms. Its valuation of self-reliance subverts the human drive to mutualism.4 It casts government as a grabbing hand instead of an engine for collective action. In downplaying the importance of our relationships with one another, it undermines the social norms that support democracy, capitalism, and other social institutions.

For these reasons, many now suggest that our political economy needs to expand its frame beyond economic growth to include collective flourishing. But what is flourishing, and what would it take to reorient our political economy to value it?…(More)”.

Science and Ethics of “Curing” Misinformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Isabelle Freiling et al: “A growing chorus of academicians, public health officials, and other science communicators have warned of what they see as an ill-informed public making poor personal or electoral decisions. Misinformation is often seen as an urgent new problem, so some members of these communities have pushed for quick but untested solutions without carefully diagnosing ethical pitfalls of rushed interventions. This article argues that attempts to “cure” public opinion that are inconsistent with best available social science evidence not only leave the scientific community vulnerable to long-term reputational damage but also raise significant ethical questions. It also suggests strategies for communicating science and health information equitably, effectively, and ethically to audiences affected by it without undermining affected audiences’ agency over what to do with it…(More)”.

Elon Musk Has Broken Disaster-Response Twitter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Juliette Kayyem: “For years, Twitter was at its best when bad things happened. Before Elon Musk bought it last fall, before it was overrun with scammy ads, before it amplified fake personas, and before its engineers were told to get more eyeballs on the owner’s tweets, Twitter was useful in saving lives during natural disasters and man-made crises. Emergency-management officials have used the platform to relate timely information to the public—when to evacuate during Hurricane Ian, in 2022; when to hide from a gunman during the Michigan State University shootings earlier this month—while simultaneously allowing members of the public to transmit real-time data. The platform didn’t just provide a valuable communications service; it changed the way emergency management functions.

That’s why Musk-era Twitter alarms so many people in my field. The platform has been downgraded in multiple ways: Service is glitchier; efforts to contain misleading information are patchier; the person at the top seems largely dismissive of outside input. But now that the platform has embedded itself so deeply in the disaster-response world, it’s difficult to replace. The rapidly deteriorating situation raises questions about platforms’ obligation to society—questions that prickly tech execs generally don’t want to consider…(More)”

Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Sander van der Linden: “From fake news to conspiracy theories, from pandemics to politics, misinformation may be the defining problem of our era. Like a virus, misinformation infects our minds – altering our beliefs and replicating at astonishing rates. Once the virus takes hold, our primary strategies of fact-checking and debunking are an insufficient cure.

In Foolproof Sander van der Linden describes how to inoculate yourself and others against the spread of misinformation, discern fact from fiction and push back against methods of mass persuasion.

Everyone is susceptible to fake news. There are polarising narratives in society, conspiracy theories are rife, fake experts dole out misleading advice and accuracy is often lost in favour of sensationalist headlines. So how and why does misinformation spread if we’re all aware of its existence? And, more importantly, what can we do about it?…(More)”.