Book edited by Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone: “One of the most fiercely debated issues of this era is what to do about “bad” speech-hate speech, disinformation and propaganda campaigns, and incitement of violence-on the internet, and in particular speech on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of our Democracy, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone have gathered an eminent cast of contributors—including Hillary Clinton, Amy Klobuchar, Sheldon Whitehouse, Mark Warner, Newt Minow,Tim Wu, Cass Sunstein, Jack Balkin, Emily Bazelon, and others—to explore the various dimensions of this problem in the American context. They stress how difficult it is to develop remedies given that some of these forms of “bad” speech are ordinarily protected by the First Amendment. Bollinger and Stone argue that it is important to remember that the last time we encountered major new communications technology-television and radio-we established a federal agency to provide oversight and to issue regulations to protect and promote “the public interest.” Featuring a variety of perspectives from some of America’s leading experts on this hotly contested issue, this volume offers new insights for the future of free speech in the social media era…(More)”.
The Infinite Playground: A Player’s Guide to Imagination
Book by Bernard De Koven: “Bernard De Koven (1941–2018) was a pioneering designer of games and theorist of fun. He studied games long before the field of game studies existed. For De Koven, games could not be reduced to artifacts and rules; they were about a sense of transcendent fun. This book, his last, is about the imagination: the imagination as a playground, a possibility space, and a gateway to wonder. The Infinite Playground extends a play-centered invitation to experience the power and delight unlocked by imagination. It offers a curriculum for playful learning.
De Koven guides the readers through a series of observations and techniques, interspersed with games. He begins with the fundamentals of play, and proceeds through the private imagination, the shared imagination, and imagining the world—observing, “the things we imagine can become the world.” Along the way, he reminisces about playing ping-pong with basketball great Bill Russell; begins the instructions for a game called Reception Line with “Mill around”; and introduces blathering games—Blather, Group Blather, Singing Blather, and The Blather Chorale—that allow the player’s consciousness to meander freely.
Delivered during the last months of his life, The Infinite Playground has been painstakingly cowritten with Holly Gramazio, who worked together with coeditors Celia Pearce and Eric Zimmerman to complete the project as Bernie De Koven’s illness made it impossible for him to continue writing. Other prominent game scholars and designers influenced by De Koven, including Katie Salen Tekinbaş, Jesper Juul, Frank Lantz, and members of Bernie’s own family, contribute short interstitial essays…(More)”
The Behavioral Economics Guide 2022
Editorial by Kathleen Vohs & Avni Shah: “This year’s Behavioral Economics Guide editorial reviews recent work in the areas of self-control and goals. To do so, we distilled the latest findings and advanced a set of guiding principles termed the FRESH framework: Fatigue, Reminders, Ease, Social influence, and Habits. Example findings reviewed include physicians giving out more prescriptions for opioids later in the workday compared to earlier (fatigue); the use of digital reminders to prompt people to re-engage with goals, such as for personal savings, from which they may have turned away (reminders); visual displays that give people data on their behavioral patterns so as to enable feedback and active monitoring (ease); the importance of geographically-local peers in changing behaviors such as residential water use (social influence); and digital and other tools that help people break the link between aspects of the environment and problematic behaviors (habits). We used the FRESH framework as a potential guide for thinking about the kinds of behaviors people can perform in achieving the goal of being environmental stewards of a more sustainable future…(More)”.
Technology is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics
Book by Stephanie Hare: “It seems that just about every new technology that we bring to bear on improving our lives brings with it some downside, side effect or unintended consequence.
These issues can pose very real and growing ethical problems for all of us. For example, automated facial recognition can make life easier and safer for us – but it also poses huge issues with regard to privacy, ownership of data and even identity theft. How do we understand and frame these debates, and work out strategies at personal and governmental levels?
Technology Is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics addresses one of today’s most pressing problems: how to create and use tools and technologies to maximize benefits and minimize harms? Drawing on the author’s experience as a technologist, political risk analyst and historian, the book offers a practical and cross-disciplinary approach that will inspire anyone creating, investing in or regulating technology, and it will empower all readers to better hold technology to account…(More)”.
Regulatory Governance: Policy Making, Legislative Drafting and Law Reform
Book by Edward Donelan: “This book describes how governments formulate policies, draft legislation, and manage stocks of legislation and how approaches to these tasks are converging. That convergence has developed over 30 years through the work by the OECD in its studies on regulatory reform and the work of other international organizations to improve regulatory management.
The Institutions of the European Union and its member states, OECD member countries and a growing number of developing and transitional countries have developed a policy best described as ‘Better Regulation.’ That policy is characterized using regulatory impact assessment, improving public consultation, and reducing administrative burdens. The policy has brought improvements in legislative drafting and managing stocks of legislation.
The book concludes with a description of the impact of information technology on governments and how the challenges posed by the Internet, globalization and pandemics are being met by new approaches to regulating to ensure its benefits exceed its costs….(More)”.
Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
Book by Geoff Mulgan: “As the world confronts both the fast catastrophe of Covid and the slow crisis of climate change, we also face a third, less visible emergency: a crisis of imagination. Millions of us can picture the world going awry, yet our confident visions of the future are largely dominated by technology and hardware. Most citizens struggle to envisage how we could live better-improve our democracy, welfare, neighborhoods or education-fueling a pervasive, pessimistic resignation.
This book argues that, although the threats are real, our fatalism has overshot. Achieving a better future depends on creative imagination: the ability to see where we might want to go, and how we might want to get there. Political veteran Geoff Mulgan offers the lessons we can learn from the past and the methods we can use now to open up our thinking about the future; to discover how to look at things not only in terms of what they are, but also what they could be.
Drawing on social sciences, the arts, philosophy and history, Mulgan shows how we can recharge our collective imagination. At a time when the public wants to see transformational social change, he provides a roadmap for the future…(More)”.
Beyond Data: Human Rights, Ethical and Social Impact Assessment in AI
Open access book by Alessandro Mantelero: “…focuses on the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on individuals and society from a legal perspective, providing a comprehensive risk-based methodological framework to address it. Building on the limitations of data protection in dealing with the challenges of AI, the author proposes an integrated approach to risk assessment that focuses on human rights and encompasses contextual social and ethical values.
The core of the analysis concerns the assessment methodology and the role of experts in steering the design of AI products and services by business and public bodies in the direction of human rights and societal values.
Taking into account the ongoing debate on AI regulation, the proposed assessment model also bridges the gap between risk-based provisions and their real-world implementation.
The central focus of the book on human rights and societal values in AI and the proposed solutions will make it of interest to legal scholars, AI developers and providers, policy makers and regulators….(More)”.
The Political Impact of the Sustainable Development Goals: Transforming Governance Through Global Goals?
Book edited by Frank Biermann, Thomas Hickmann, and Carole-Anne Sénit: “Written by an international team of over sixty experts and drawing on over three thousand scientific studies, this is the first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched by the United Nations in 2015. It explores in detail the political steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals on the UN system and the policies of countries in the Global North and Global South; on institutional integration and policy coherence, and on the ecological integrity and inclusiveness of sustainability policies worldwide. This book is a key resource for scholars, policymakers and activists concerned with the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, and those working in political science, international relations and environmental studies….(More)”.
Against Progress: Intellectual Property and Fundamental Values in the Internet Age
Book by Jessica Silbey: “When first written into the Constitution, intellectual property aimed to facilitate “progress of science and the useful arts” by granting rights to authors and inventors. Today, when rapid technological evolution accompanies growing wealth inequality and political and social divisiveness, the constitutional goal of “progress” may pertain to more basic, human values, redirecting IP’s emphasis to the commonweal instead of private interests. Against Progress considers contemporary debates about intellectual property law as concerning the relationship between the constitutional mandate of progress and fundamental values, such as equality, privacy, and distributive justice, that are increasingly challenged in today’s internet age. Following a legal analysis of various intellectual property court cases, Jessica Silbey examines the experiences of everyday creators and innovators navigating ownership, sharing, and sustainability within the internet eco-system and current IP laws. Crucially, the book encourages refiguring the substance of “progress” and the function of intellectual property in terms that demonstrate the urgency of art and science to social justice today…(More)”.
Beyond Data: Human Rights, Ethical and Social Impact Assessment in AI
Open Access book by Alessandro Mantelero: “…focuses on the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on individuals and society from a legal perspective, providing a comprehensive risk-based methodological framework to address it. Building on the limitations of data protection in dealing with the challenges of AI, the author proposes an integrated approach to risk assessment that focuses on human rights and encompasses contextual social and ethical values.
The core of the analysis concerns the assessment methodology and the role of experts in steering the design of AI products and services by business and public bodies in the direction of human rights and societal values.
Taking into account the ongoing debate on AI regulation, the proposed assessment model also bridges the gap between risk-based provisions and their real-world implementation.
The central focus of the book on human rights and societal values in AI and the proposed solutions will make it of interest to legal scholars, AI developers and providers, policy makers and regulators…(More)”.