New York City Takes Aim at AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Samuel Greengard: “As concerns over artificial intelligence (AI) grow and angst about its potential impact increase, political leaders and government agencies are taking notice. In November, U.S. president Joe Biden issued an executive order designed to build guardrails around the technology. Meanwhile, the European Union (EU) is currently developing a legal framework around responsible AI.

Yet, what is often overlooked about artificial intelligence is that it’s more likely to impact people on a local level. AI touches housing, transportation, healthcare, policing and numerous other areas relating to business and daily life. It increasingly affects citizens, government employees, and businesses in both obvious and unintended ways.

One city attempting to position itself at the vanguard of AI is New York. In October 2023, New York City announced a blueprint for developing, managing, and using the technology responsibly. The New York City Artificial Intelligence Action Plan—the first of its kind in the U.S.—is designed to help officials and the public navigate the AI space.

“It’s a fairly comprehensive plan that addresses both the use of AI within city government and the responsible use of the technology,” says Clifford S. Stein, Wai T. Chang Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and Interim Director of the Data Science Institute at Columbia University.

Adds Stefaan Verhulst, co-founder and chief research and development officer at The GovLab and Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), “AI localism focuses on the idea that cities are where most of the action is in regard to AI.”…(More)”.

Internet use does not appear to harm mental health, study finds

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim Bradshaw at the Financial Times: “A study of more than 2mn people’s internet use found no “smoking gun” for widespread harm to mental health from online activities such as browsing social media and gaming, despite widely claimed concerns that mobile apps can cause depression and anxiety.

Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, who said their study was the largest of its kind, said they found no evidence to support “popular ideas that certain groups are more at risk” from the technology.

However, Andrew Przybylski, professor at the institute — part of the University of Oxford — said that the data necessary to establish a causal connection was “absent” without more co-operation from tech companies. If apps do harm mental health, only the companies that build them have the user data that could prove it, he said.

“The best data we have available suggests that there is not a global link between these factors,” said Przybylski, who carried out the study with Matti Vuorre, a professor at Tilburg University. Because the “stakes are so high” if online activity really did lead to mental health problems, any regulation aimed at addressing it should be based on much more “conclusive” evidence, he added.

“Global Well-Being and Mental Health in the Internet Age” was published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science on Tuesday. 

In their paper, Przybylski and Vuorre studied data on psychological wellbeing from 2.4mn people aged 15 to 89 in 168 countries between 2005 and 2022, which they contrasted with industry data about growth in internet subscriptions over that time, as well as tracking associations between mental health and internet adoption in 202 countries from 2000-19.

“Our results do not provide evidence supporting the view that the internet and technologies enabled by it, such as smartphones with internet access, are actively promoting or harming either wellbeing or mental health globally,” they concluded. While there was “some evidence” of greater associations between mental health problems and technology among younger people, these “appeared small in magnitude”, they added.

The report contrasts with a growing body of research in recent years that has connected the beginning of the smartphone era, around 2010, with growing rates of anxiety and depression, especially among teenage girls. Studies have suggested that reducing time on social media can benefit mental health, while those who spend the longest online are at greater risk of harm…(More)”.

Meta is giving researchers more access to Facebook and Instagram data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Tate Ryan-Mosley: “Meta is releasing a new transparency product called the Meta Content Library and API, according to an announcement from the company today. The new tools will allow select researchers to access publicly available data on Facebook and Instagram in an effort to give a more overarching view of what’s happening on the platforms. 

The move comes as social media companies are facing public and regulatory pressure to increase transparency about how their products—specifically recommendation algorithms—work and what impact they have. Academic researchers have long been calling for better access to data from social media platforms, including Meta. This new library is a step toward increased visibility about what is happening on its platforms and the effect that Meta’s products have on online conversations, politics, and society at large. 

In an interview, Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said the tools “are really quite important” in that they provide, in a lot of ways, “the most comprehensive access to publicly available content across Facebook and Instagram of anything that we’ve built to date.” The Content Library will also help the company meet new regulatory requirements and obligations on data sharing and transparency, as the company notes in a blog post Tuesday. 

The library and associated API were first released as a beta version several months ago and allow researchers to access near-real-time data about pages, posts, groups, and events on Facebook and creator and business accounts on Instagram, as well as the associated numbers of reactions, shares, comments, and post view counts. While all this data is publicly available—as in, anyone can see public posts, reactions, and comments on Facebook—the new library makes it easier for researchers to search and analyze this content at scale…(More)”.

Hypotheses devised by AI could find ‘blind spots’ in research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Matthew Hutson: “One approach is to use AI to help scientists brainstorm. This is a task that large language models — AI systems trained on large amounts of text to produce new text — are well suited for, says Yolanda Gil, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles who has worked on AI scientists. Language models can produce inaccurate information and present it as real, but this ‘hallucination’ isn’t necessarily bad, Mullainathan says. It signifies, he says, “‘here’s a kind of thing that looks true’. That’s exactly what a hypothesis is.”

Blind spots are where AI might prove most useful. James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, has pushed AI to make ‘alien’ hypotheses — those that a human would be unlikely to make. In a paper published earlier this year in Nature Human Behaviour4, he and his colleague Jamshid Sourati built knowledge graphs containing not just materials and properties, but also researchers. Evans and Sourati’s algorithm traversed these networks, looking for hidden shortcuts between materials and properties. The aim was to maximize the plausibility of AI-devised hypotheses being true while minimizing the chances that researchers would hit on them naturally. For instance, if scientists who are studying a particular drug are only distantly connected to those studying a disease that it might cure, then the drug’s potential would ordinarily take much longer to discover.

When Evans and Sourati fed data published up to 2001 to their AI, they found that about 30% of its predictions about drug repurposing and the electrical properties of materials had been uncovered by researchers, roughly six to ten years later. The system can be tuned to make predictions that are more likely to be correct but also less of a leap, on the basis of concurrent findings and collaborations, Evans says. But “if we’re predicting what people are going to do next year, that just feels like a scoop machine”, he adds. He’s more interested in how the technology can take science in entirely new directions….(More)”

Boston experimented with using generative AI for governing. It went surprisingly well

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Santiago Garces and Stephen Goldsmith: “…we see the possible advances of generative AI as having the most potential. For example, Boston asked OpenAI to “suggest interesting analyses” after we uploaded 311 data. In response, it suggested two things: time series analysis by case time, and a comparative analysis by neighborhood. This meant that city officials spent less time navigating the mechanics of computing an analysis, and had more time to dive into the patterns of discrepancy in service. The tools make graphs, maps, and other visualizations with a simple prompt. With lower barriers to analyze data, our city officials can formulate more hypotheses and challenge assumptions, resulting in better decisions.

Not all city officials have the engineering and web development experience needed to run these tests and code. But this experiment shows that other city employees, without any STEM background, could, with just a bit of training, utilize these generative AI tools to supplement their work.

To make this possible, more authority would need to be granted to frontline workers who too often have their hands tied with red tape. Therefore, we encourage government leaders to allow workers more discretion to solve problems, identify risks, and check data. This is not inconsistent with accountability; rather, supervisors can utilize these same generative AI tools, to identify patterns or outliers—say, where race is inappropriately playing a part in decision-making, or where program effectiveness drops off (and why). These new tools will more quickly provide an indication as to which interventions are making a difference, or precisely where a historic barrier is continuing to harm an already marginalized community.  

Civic groups will be able to hold government accountable in new ways, too. This is where the linguistic power of large language models really shines: Public employees and community leaders alike can request that tools create visual process maps, build checklists based on a description of a project, or monitor progress compliance. Imagine if people who have a deep understanding of a city—its operations, neighborhoods, history, and hopes for the future—can work toward shared goals, equipped with the most powerful tools of the digital age. Gatekeepers of formerly mysterious processes will lose their stranglehold, and expediters versed in state and local ordinances, codes, and standards, will no longer be necessary to maneuver around things like zoning or permitting processes. 

Numerous challenges would remain. Public workforces would still need better data analysis skills in order to verify whether a tool is following the right steps and producing correct information. City and state officials would need technology partners in the private sector to develop and refine the necessary tools, and these relationships raise challenging questions about privacy, security, and algorithmic bias…(More)”

Design Thinking Misses the Mark

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Anne-Laure Fayard & Sarah Fathallah: “Nonprofits, governments, and international agencies often turn to design thinking to tackle complex social challenges and develop innovative solutions with—rather than for—people. Design thinking was conceptualized by designer Nigel Cross more than four decades ago, notably in the 1982 Design Studies article “Designerly Ways of Knowing.” The approach was later packaged for popular consumption by global design and innovation consultancy IDEO. Design thinking quickly became the go-to innovation tool kit in the for-profit world—and, soon after, in the international development and social sectors—because of its commitment to center communities in the collaborative design process.

IDEO’s then-CEO Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt, who was then lead of the IDEO social innovation group that became IDEO.org, championed design thinking for the social sector in their 2010 Stanford Social Innovation Review article, “Design Thinking for Social Innovation,” which has become an important reference for design thinking in the social sector. Embraced by high-profile philanthropists like Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation cofounder Melinda Gates and Acumen founder and CEO Jacqueline Novogratz, design thinking soared in popularity because it promised to deliver profound societal change. Brown even claimed, in a 2014 Harvard Business Review article, that design thinking could improve democratic capitalism.

However, design thinking has not lived up to such promises. In a 2023 MIT Technology Review article, writer and designer Rebecca Ackerman argued that while “design thinking was supposed to fix the world,” organizations rarely implement the ideas generated during the design-thinking process. The failure to implement these ideas resulted from either an inadequate understanding of the problem and/or of the complexities of the institutional and cultural contexts…(More)”.

A Blueprint for Designing Better Digital Government Services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Joe Lee: “Public perceptions about government and government service delivery are at an all-time low across the United States. Plagued government legacy systems—too often using outdated programming language—are struggling to hold up under the weight of increased demand, and IT modernization efforts are floundering at all levels of government. This is taking place against the backdrop of a rapidly digitizing world that places a premium on speedy, seamless, simple, and secure customer service.

Government’s “customers” typically confront a whiplash experience between accessing services from the private sector and government. If a customer doesn’t like the quality of service they get from a particular business, they can usually turn to any number of competitors; that same customer has no viable alternative to a service provided by government, regardless of the quality of that service.

When Governor Josh Shapiro took office earlier this year in Pennsylvania, the start of a new administration presented an opportunity to reexamine how the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania delivered services for residents and visitors. As veteran government technologist, Jennifer Pahlka, points out, government tends to be fixated on ensuring compliance with policies and procedures frequently at the expense of the people they serve. In other words, while government services may fulfill statutory and policy requirements, the speed, seamlessness, and simplicity in which that service is ultimately delivered to the end customer is oftentimes an afterthought.

There’s a chorus of voices in the growing public interest technology movement working to shift this stubborn paradigm to proactively and persistently center people at the heart of each interaction between government and the customer. In fact, Pennsylvania is part of a growing coalition of states transforming their digital services across the country. For Pennsylvania and so many states, the road to creating truly accessible digital services involves excavating a mountain of legacy systems and policies, changing cultural and organizational paradigms, and building a movement that puts people at the center of the problem…(More)”.

Why the future might not be where you think it is

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ruth Ogden: “Imagine the future. Where is it for you? Do you see yourself striding towards it? Perhaps it’s behind you. Maybe it’s even above you.

And what about the past? Do you imagine looking over your shoulder to see it?

How you answer these questions will depend on who you are and where you come from. The way we picture the future is influenced by the culture we grow up in and the languages we are exposed to.

For many people who grew up in the UK, the US and much of Europe, the future is in front of them, and the past is behind them. People in these cultures typically perceive time as linear. They see themselves as continually moving towards the future because they cannot go back to the past.

In some other cultures, however, the location of the past and the future are inverted. The Aymara, a South American Indigenous group of people living in the Andes, conceptualise the future as behind them and the past in front of them.

Scientists discovered this by studying the gestures of the Aymara people during discussions of topics such as ancestors and traditions. The researchers noticed that when Aymara spoke about their ancestors, they were likely to gesture in front of themselves, indicating that the past was in front. However, when they were asked about a future event, their gesture seemed to indicate that the future was perceived as behind.

Analysis of how people write, speak and gesture about time suggests that the Aymara are not alone. Speakers of Darij, an Arabic dialect spoken in Morocco, also appear to imagine the past as in front and the future behind. As do some Vietnamese speakers.

The future doesn’t always have to be behind or in front of us. There is evidence that some Mandarin speakers represent the future as down and the past as up. These differences suggest that there is no universal location for the past, present and future. Instead, people construct these representations based on their upbringing and surroundings.

Culture doesn’t just influence where we see the position of the future. It also influences how we see ourselves getting there…(More)”.

What causes such maddening bottlenecks in government? ‘Kludgeocracy.’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jennifer Pahlka: “Former president Donald Trump wants to “obliterate the deep state.” As a Democrat who values government, I am chilled by the prospect. But I sometimes partly agree with him.

Certainly, Trump and I are poles apart on the nature of the problem. His “deep state” evokes a shadowy cabal that doesn’t exist. What is true, however, is that red tape and misaligned gears frequently stymie progress on even the most straightforward challenges. Ten years ago, Steven M. Teles, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, coined the term “kludgeocracy” to describe the problem. Since then, it has only gotten worse.

Whatever you call it, the sprawling federal bureaucracy takes care of everything from the nuclear arsenal to the social safety net to making sure our planes don’t crash. Public servants do critical work; they should be honored, not disparaged.

Yet most of them are frustrated. I’ve spoken with staffers in a dozen federal agencies this year while rolling out my book about government culture and effectiveness. I heard over and over about rigid, maximalist interpretations of rules, regulations, policies and procedures that take precedence over mission. Too often acting responsibly in government has come to mean not acting at all.

Kludgeocracy Example No. 1: Within government, designers are working to make online forms and applications easier to use. To succeed, they need to do user research, most of which is supposed to be exempt from the data-collection requirements of the Paperwork Reduction Act. Yet compliance officers insist that designers send their research plans for approval by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) under the act. Countless hours can go into the preparation and internal approvals of a “package” for OIRA, which then might post the plans to the Federal Register for the fun-house-mirror purpose of collecting public input on a plan to collect public input. This can result in months of delay. Meanwhile, no input happens, and no paperwork gets reduced.

Kludgeocracy Example No. 2: For critical economic and national security reasons, Congress passed a law mandating the establishment of a center for scientific research. Despite clear legislative intent, work was bogged down for months when one agency applied a statute to prohibit a certain structure for the center and another applied a different statute to require that structure. The lawyers ultimately found a solution, but it was more complex and cumbersome than anyone had hoped for. All the while, the clock was ticking.

What causes such maddening bottlenecks? The problem is mainly one of culture and incentives. It could be solved if leaders in each branch — in good faith — took the costs seriously…(More)”.

The battle over right to repair is a fight over your car’s data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ofer Tur-Sinai: “Cars are no longer just a means of transportation. They have become rolling hubs of data communication. Modern vehicles regularly transmit information wirelessly to their manufacturers.

However, as cars grow “smarter,” the right to repair them is under siege.

As legal scholars, we find that the question of whether you and your local mechanic can tap into your car’s data to diagnose and repair spans issues of property rights, trade secrets, cybersecurity, data privacy and consumer rights. Policymakers are forced to navigate this complex legal landscape and ideally are aiming for a balanced approach that upholds the right to repair, while also ensuring the safety and privacy of consumers…

Until recently, repairing a car involved connecting to its standard on-board diagnostics port to retrieve diagnostic data. The ability for independent repair shops – not just those authorized by the manufacturer – to access this information was protected by a state law in Massachusetts, approved by voters on Nov. 6, 2012, and by a nationwide memorandum of understanding between major car manufacturers and the repair industry signed on Jan. 15, 2014.

However, with the rise of telematics systems, which combine computing with telecommunications, these dynamics are shifting. Unlike the standardized onboard diagnostics ports, telematics systems vary across car manufacturers. These systems are often protected by digital locks, and circumventing these locks could be considered a violation of copyright law. The telematics systems also encrypt the diagnostic data before transmitting it to the manufacturer.

This reduces the accessibility of telematics information, potentially locking out independent repair shops and jeopardizing consumer choice – a lack of choice that can lead to increased costs for consumers….

One issue left unresolved by the legislation is the ownership of vehicle data. A vehicle generates all sorts of data as it operates, including location, diagnostic, driving behavior, and even usage patterns of in-car systems – for example, which apps you use and for how long.

In recent years, the question of data ownership has gained prominence. In 2015, Congress legislated that the data stored in event data recorders belongs to the vehicle owner. This was a significant step in acknowledging the vehicle owner’s right over specific datasets. However, the broader issue of data ownership in today’s connected cars remains unresolved…(More)”.