How an AI Utopia Would Work

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sami Mahroum at Project Syndicate: “…It is more than 500 years since Sir Thomas More found inspiration for the “Kingdom of Utopia” while strolling the streets of Antwerp. So, when I traveled there from Dubai in May to speak about artificial intelligence (AI), I couldn’t help but draw parallels to Raphael Hythloday, the character in Utopia who regales sixteenth-century Englanders with tales of a better world.

As home to the world’s first Minister of AI, as well as museums, academies, and foundations dedicated to studying the future, Dubai is on its own Hythloday-esque voyage. Whereas Europe, in general, has grown increasingly anxious about technological threats to employment, the United Arab Emirates has enthusiastically embraced the labor-saving potential of AI and automation.

There are practical reasons for this. The ratio of indigenous-to-foreign labor in the Gulf states is highly imbalanced, ranging from a high of 67% in Saudi Arabia to a low of 11% in the UAE. And because the region’s desert environment cannot support further population growth, the prospect of replacing people with machines has become increasingly attractive.

But there is also a deeper cultural difference between the two regions. Unlike Western Europe, the birthplace of both the Industrial Revolution and the “Protestant work ethic,” Arab societies generally do not “live to work,” but rather “work to live,” placing a greater value on leisure time. Such attitudes are not particularly compatible with economic systems that require squeezing ever more productivity out of labor, but they are well suited for an age of AI and automation….

Fortunately, AI and data-driven innovation could offer a way forward. In what could be perceived as a kind of AI utopia, the paradox of a bigger state with a smaller budget could be reconciled, because the government would have the tools to expand public goods and services at a very small cost.

The biggest hurdle would be cultural: As early as 1948, the German philosopher Joseph Pieper warned against the “proletarianization” of people and called for leisure to be the basis for culture. Westerners would have to abandon their obsession with the work ethic, as well as their deep-seated resentment toward “free riders.” They would have to start differentiating between work that is necessary for a dignified existence, and work that is geared toward amassing wealth and achieving status. The former could potentially be all but eliminated.

With the right mindset, all societies could start to forge a new AI-driven social contract, wherein the state would capture a larger share of the return on assets, and distribute the surplus generated by AI and automation to residents. Publicly-owned machines would produce a wide range of goods and services, from generic drugs, food, clothes, and housing, to basic research, security, and transportation….(More)”.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the GDPR

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ariane Adam at DataStewards.net: “The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was approved by the EU Parliament on 14 April 2016 and came into force on 25 May 2018….

The coming into force of this important regulation has created confusion and concern about penalties, particularly in the private sector….There is also apprehension about how the GDPR will affect the opening and sharing of valuable databases. At a time when open data is increasingly shaping the choices we make, from finding the fastest route home to choosing the best medical or education provider, misinformation about data protection principles leads to concerns that ‘privacy’ will be used as a smokescreen to not publish important information. Allaying the concerns of private organisations and businesses in this area is particularly important as often the datasets that most matter, and that could have the most impact if they were open, do not belong to governments.

Looking at the regulation and its effects about one year on, this paper advances a positive case for the GDPR and aims to demonstrate that a proper understanding of its underlying principles can not only assist in promoting consumer confidence and therefore business growth, but also enable organisations to safely open and share important and valuable datasets….(More)”.

How credit unions could help people make the most of personal data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dylan Walsh at MIT Sloan: “In May of 2018, the EU adopted the General Data Protection Regulation, referred to by The New York Timesas “the world’s toughest rules to protect people’s online data.” Among its many safeguards, the GDPR gave individuals ownership of their personal data and thereby restricted its collection and use by businesses.

“That’s a good first start,” said Alex Pentland, a co-creator of the MIT Media Lab who played a foundational role in the development of the GDPR. “But ownership isn’t enough. Simply having the rights to your data doesn’t allow you to do much with it.” In response to this shortcoming, Pentland and his team have proposed the establishment of data cooperatives.

The idea is conceptually straightforward: Individuals would pool their personal data in a single institution — just as they pool money in banks — and that institution would both protect the data and put it to use. Pentland and his team suggest credit unions as one type of organization that could fill this role. And while companies would need to request permission to use consumer data, consumers themselves could request analytic insights from the cooperative. Lyft drivers, for instance, might compare their respective incomes across routes, and ride-share passengers could compare how much they pay relative to other cooperative members….

Several states have now asked credit unions to look into the idea of data cooperatives, but the model has yet to gain a foothold. “Credit unions are conservative,” Pentland said. But assuming the idea gains traction, the infrastructure won’t be difficult to build. Technology exists to automatically record and organize all the data that we give to companies; and credit unions, which have 100 million members nationwide, possess charters readymade to take on data management….(More)”.

Sharing data can help prevent public health emergencies in Africa

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Moses John Bockarie at The Conversation: “Global collaboration and sharing data on public health emergencies is important to fight the spread of infectious diseases. If scientists and health workers can openly share their data across regions and organisations, countries can be better prepared and respond faster to disease outbreaks.

This was the case in with the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Close to 100 scientists, clinicians, health workers and data analysts from around the world worked together to help contain the spread of the disease.

But there’s a lack of trust when it comes to sharing data in north-south collaborations. African researchers are suspicious that their northern partners could publish data without acknowledging the input from the less resourced southern institutions where the data was first generated. Until recently, the authorship of key scientific publications, based on collaborative work in Africa, was dominated by scientists from outside Africa.

The Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness, an international network of major research funding organisations, recently published a roadmap to data sharing. This may go some way to address the data sharing challenges. Members of the network are expected to encourage their grantees to be inclusive and publish their results in open access journals. The network includes major funders of research in Africa like the European Commission, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust.

The roadmap provides a guide on how funders can accelerate research data sharing by the scientists they fund. It recommends that research funding institutions make real-time, external data sharing a requirement. And that research needs to be part of a multi-disciplinary disease network to advance public health emergencies responses.

In addition, funding should focus on strengthening institutions’ capacity on a number of fronts. This includes data management, improving data policies, building trust and aligning tools for data sharing.

Allowing researchers to freely access data generated by global academic counterparts is critical for rapidly informing disease control strategies in public health emergencies….(More)”.

Co-Creation Of Public Services: Why And How

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by David Osimo and Francesco Mureddu: “Co-creation” and “design thinking” are trendy themes – the topic of innumerable conferences and a growing number of academic papers. But how do we turn co-creation into a reality for Europe’s 508 million citizens? In Co-Creation of Public Services: Why and How, Co-VAL’s new Policy Brief, co-authors Francesco Mureddu and David Osimo propose a ten-step roadmap for delivering genuinely user-centric digital government. The authors argue that it is time to put co-creation at the core of government functioning.

According to the authors, “today, co-creation is a mature subject. There is an extended theoretical and applied research effort underway, led in many places by members of the Co-VAL consortium, whose research informed the new policy brief.  And there is a solid professional community, ready to deliver, and staffed by people with clearly identified job profiles, such as “user researcher” and “service designer.” There are even success stories of entire countries that scaled up design thinking at national level, such as Italy’s Government Commissioner and Digital Transformation Team and the United Kingdom’s legendary Government Digital Services.”…(More)”.

Why data ownership is the wrong approach to protecting privacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by John B. Morris Jr. and Cameron F. Kerry: “It’s my data.” It’s an idea often expressed about information privacy.

Indeed, in congressional hearings last year, Mark Zuckerberg said multiple times that “people own all of their own content” on Facebook. A survey by Insights Network earlier this year found that 79% of consumers said they want compensation when their data is shared. Musician and tech entrepreneur will.i.am took to the website of The Economist to argue that payment for data is a way to “redress the balance” between individuals and “data monarchs.”

Some policymakers are taking such thinking to heart. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) introduced a three-page bill, the “Own Your Own Data Act of 2019,” which declares that “each individual owns and has an exclusive property right in the data that individual generates on the internet” and requires that social media companies obtain licenses to use this data. Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) are filing legislation to require Facebook, Google, and other large collectors of data to disclose the value of personal data they collect, although the bill would not require payments. In California, Governor Gavin Newsome wants to pursue a “data dividend” designed to “share in the wealth that is created from [people’s] data.”

Treating our data as our property has understandable appeal. It touches what the foundational privacy thinker Alan Westin identified as an essential aspect of privacy, a right “to control, edit, manage, and delete information about [individuals] and decide when, how, and to what extent information is communicated to others.” It expresses the unfairness people feel about an asymmetrical marketplace in which we know little about the data we share but the companies that receive the data can profit by extracting marketable information.

The trouble is, it’s not your data; it’s not their data either.  Treating data like it is property fails to recognize either the value that varieties of personal information serve or the abiding interest that individuals have in their personal information even if they choose to “sell” it. Data is not a commodity. It is information. Any system of information rights—whether patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property, or privacy rights—presents some tension with strong interest in the free flow of information that is reflected by the First Amendment. Our personal information is in demand precisely because it has value to others and to society across a myriad of uses.

Treating personal information as property to be licensed or sold may induce people to trade away their privacy rights for very little value while injecting enormous friction into free flow of information. The better way to strengthen privacy is to ensure that individual privacy interests are respected as personal information flows to desirable uses, not to reduce personal data to a commodity….(More)”.

Three Companies Innovating Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matt Harder at Beyond Voting: “….Below, we’ll explore three websites that allow citizens to communicate better with their governing systems.

Countable.us makes it easier to know what your representatives are voting on, and to tell them how you think they should vote. For each upcoming bill, you can suggest a yea or nay to your representative via email or can even send video messages. Each bill also has a lively debate section so the yeas and nays can share, upvote their opinions and learn from each other. The result is seeing more informed and better arguments in favor of your preferences, and perhaps more importantly, against.

IssueVoter.us is similar to Countable in that you give your opinions to your representatives. But IssueVoter puts a different spin on it by giving you a “scorecard” highlighting how closely your representatives votes align to your preferences. The site is still new, so the functionality is not as great as it could be, but the concept is worth note.

Bang the Table focuses on engagement at a local level. They create civic engagement dashboards for cities that allow residents to stay informed and share opinions about city projects. They offer several levels of engagement, from simply dispensing information for the city to engaging citizens in collective discussions and decision making. Fayetteville, AR used them to make the engagement page Speak Up Fayetteville, which informed citizens about projects such as the Cultural Arts Corridor.

While none of these are driving massive change just yet, it’s easy to imagine how they could be enormously impactful if embraced at scale. First, they will all have to figure out how to design websites which are appealing enough to bring the masses, yet meaningful enough to benefit decision-makers. We’re stuck in the in-between phase where the internet is the most powerful communication medium, but we haven’t learned to utilize it for productive democratic purposes….(More)”.

Identity in the Decentralized Web

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Jim Nelson: “The idea is that web sites will verify you much as a bartender checks your ID before pouring a drink.  The bar doesn’t store a copy of your card and the bartender doesn’t look at your name or address; only your age is pertinent to receive service.  The next time you enter the bar the bartender once again asks for proof of age, which you may or may not relinquish. That’s the promise of self-sovereign identity.

At the Decentralized Web Summit, questions and solutions were bounced around in the hopes of solving this fundamental problem.  Developers spearheading the next web hashed out the criteria for decentralized identity, including:

  • secure: to prevent fraud, maintain privacy, and ensure trust between all parties
  • self-sovereign: individual ownership of private information
  • consent: fine-tuned control over what information third-parties are privy to
  • directed identity: manage multiple identities for different contexts (for example, your doctor can access certain aspects while your insurance company accesses others)
  • and, of course, decentralized: no central authority or governing body holds private keys or generates identifiers

One problem with decentralized identity is that these problems often compete, pulling in polar directions.

Courtesy of Jolocom

For example, while security seems like a no-brainer, with self-sovereign identity the end-user is in control (and not Facebook, Google, or Twitter).  It’s incumbent on them to secure their information. This raises questions of key management, data storage practices, and so on. Facebook, Google, and Twitter pay full-time engineers to do this job; handing that responsibility to end-users shifts the burden to someone who may not be so technically savvy.  The inconvenience of key management and such also creates more hurdles for widespread adoption of the decentralized web.

The good news is, there are many working proposals today attempting to solve the above problems.  One of the more promising is DID (Decentralized Identifier).

A DID is simply a URI, a familiar piece of text to most people nowadays.  Each DID references a record stored in a blockchain. DIDs are not tied to any particular blockchain, and so they’re interoperable with existing and future technologies.  DIDs are cryptographically secure as well.

DIDs require no central authority to produce or validate.  If you want a DID, you can generate one yourself, or as many was you want.  In fact, you should generate lots of them.  Each unique DID gives the user fine-grained control over what personal information is revealed when interacting with a myriad of services and people.

If you’re interested to learn more, I recommend reading Michiel Mulders’ article on DIDs, “the Internet’s ‘missing identity layer’.”  The DID working technical specification is being developed by the W3C.  And those looking for code and community, check out the Decentralized Identity Foundation…(More)”.

Age of the expert as policymaker is coming to an end

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Wolfgang Münchau at the Financial Times: “…Where the conflation of the expert and the policymaker did real damage was not to policy but to expertdom itself. It compromised the experts’ most prized asset — their independence.

When economics blogging started to become fashionable, I sat on a podium with an academic blogger who predicted that people like him would usurp the role of the economics newspaper columnist within a period of 10 years. That was a decade ago. His argument was that trained economists were just smarter. What he did not reckon with is that it is hard to speak truth to power when you have to beg that power to fund your think-tank or institute. E

ven less so once you are politically attached or appointed. Independence matters. A good example of a current issue where lack of independence gets in the way is the debate on cryptocurrencies. I agree that governments should not lightly concede the money monopoly of the state, which is at the heart of our economic system. But I sometimes wonder whether those who hyperventilate about crypto do so because they find the whole concept offensive. Cryptocurrencies embody a denial of economics. There are no monetary policy committees. Cryptocurrencies may, or may not, damage the economy. But they surely damage the economist.

Even the best arguments lose power when they get mixed up with personal interests. If you want to be treated as an independent authority, do not join a policy committee, or become a minister or central banker. As soon as you do, you have changed camps. You may think of yourself as an expert. The rest of the world does not. The minimum needed to maintain or regain credibility is to state conflicts of interests openly. The only option in such cases is to be transparent. This is also why financial journalists have to declare the shares they own. The experts I listen to are those who are independent, and who do not follow a political agenda. The ones I avoid are the zealots and those who wander off their reservation and make pronouncements without inhibition. An economist may have strong views on the benefits of vaccination, for example, but is still no expert on the subject. And I often cringe when I hear a doctor trying to prove a point by using statistics. The world will continue to need policymakers and the experts who advise them. But more than that, it needs them to be independent….(More)”.

The language we use to describe data can also help us fix its problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Luke Stark & Anna Lauren Hoffmann at Quartz: “Data is, apparently, everything.

It’s the “new oil” that fuels online business. It comes in floods or tsunamis. We access it via “streams” or “fire hoses.” We scrape it, mine it, bank it, and clean it. (Or, if you prefer your buzzphrases with a dash of ageism and implicit misogyny, big data is like “teenage sex,” while working with it is “the sexiest job” of the century.)

These data metaphors can seem like empty cliches, but at their core they’re efforts to come to grips with the continuing onslaught of connected devices and the huge amounts of data they generate.

In a recent article, we—an algorithmic-fairness researcher at Microsoft and a data-ethics scholar at the University of Washington—push this connection one step further. More than simply helping us wrap our collective heads around data-fueled technological change, we set out to learn what these metaphors can teach us about the real-life ethics of collecting and handling data today.

Instead of only drawing from the norms and commitments of computer science, information science, and statistics, what if we looked at the ethics of the professions evoked by our data metaphors instead?…(More)”.