A World Divided Over Artificial Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Aziz Huq: “…Through multinational communiqués and bilateral talks, an international framework for regulating AI does seem to be coalescing. Take a close look at U.S. President Joe Biden’s October 2023 executive order on AI; the EU’s AI Act, which passed the European Parliament in December 2023 and will likely be finalized later this year; or China’s slate of recent regulations on the topic, and a surprising degree of convergence appears. They have much in common. These regimes broadly share the common goal of preventing AI’s misuse without restraining innovation in the process. Optimists have floated proposals for closer international management of AI, such as the ideas presented in Foreign Affairs by the geopolitical analyst Ian Bremmer and the entrepreneur Mustafa Suleyman and the plan offered by Suleyman and Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, in the Financial Times in which they called for the creation of an international panel akin to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to “inform governments about the current state of AI capabilities and make evidence-based predictions about what’s coming.”

But these ambitious plans to forge a new global governance regime for AI may collide with an unfortunate obstacle: cold reality. The great powers, namely, China, the United States, and the EU, may insist publicly that they want to cooperate on regulating AI, but their actions point toward a future of fragmentation and competition. Divergent legal regimes are emerging that will frustrate any cooperation when it comes to access to semiconductors, the setting of technical standards, and the regulation of data and algorithms. This path doesn’t lead to a coherent, contiguous global space for uniform AI-related rules but to a divided landscape of warring regulatory blocs—a world in which the lofty idea that AI can be harnessed for the common good is dashed on the rocks of geopolitical tensions…(More)”.

The Limits of Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by C.Thi Nguyen: “…Right now, the language of policymaking is data. (I’m talking about “data” here as a concept, not as particular measurements.) Government agencies, corporations, and other policymakers all want to make decisions based on clear data about positive outcomes.  They want to succeed on the metrics—to succeed in clear, objective, and publicly comprehensible terms. But metrics and data are incomplete by their basic nature. Every data collection method is constrained and every dataset is filtered.

Some very important things don’t make their way into the data. It’s easier to justify health care decisions in terms of measurable outcomes: increased average longevity or increased numbers of lives saved in emergency room visits, for example. But there are so many important factors that are far harder to measure: happiness, community, tradition, beauty, comfort, and all the oddities that go into “quality of life.”

Consider, for example, a policy proposal that doctors should urge patients to sharply lower their saturated fat intake. This should lead to better health outcomes, at least for those that are easier to measure: heart attack numbers and average longevity. But the focus on easy-to-measure outcomes often diminishes the salience of other downstream consequences: the loss of culinary traditions, disconnection from a culinary heritage, and a reduction in daily culinary joy. It’s easy to dismiss such things as “intangibles.” But actually, what’s more tangible than a good cheese, or a cheerful fondue party with friends?…(More)”.

Automakers Are Sharing Consumers’ Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Kashmir Hill: “Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He’s never been responsible for an accident.

So Mr. Dahl, 65, was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21 percent. Quotes from other insurance companies were also high. One insurance agent told him his LexisNexis report was a factor.

LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a “Risk Solutions” division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl’s request, LexisNexis sent him a 258-page “consumer disclosure report,” which it must provide per the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

What it contained stunned him: more than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven the Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only thing it didn’t have is where they had driven the car.

On a Thursday morning in June for example, the car had been driven 7.33 miles in 18 minutes; there had been two rapid accelerations and two incidents of hard braking.

According to the report, the trip details had been provided by General Motors — the manufacturer of the Chevy Bolt. LexisNexis analyzed that driving data to create a risk score “for insurers to use as one factor of many to create more personalized insurance coverage,” according to a LexisNexis spokesman, Dean Carney. Eight insurance companies had requested information about Mr. Dahl from LexisNexis over the previous month.

“It felt like a betrayal,” Mr. Dahl said. “They’re taking information that I didn’t realize was going to be shared and screwing with our insurance.”..(More)”.

A Plan to Develop Open Science’s Green Shoots into a Thriving Garden

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Greg Tananbaum, Chelle Gentemann, Kamran Naim, and Christopher Steven Marcum: “…As it’s moved from an abstract set of principles about access to research and data into the realm of real-world activities, the open science movement has mirrored some of the characteristics of the open source movement: distributed, independent, with loosely coordinated actions happening in different places at different levels. Globally, many things are happening, often disconnected, but still interrelated: open science has sowed a constellation of thriving green shoots, not quite yet a garden, but all growing rapidly on arable soil.

Streamlining research processes, reducing duplication of efforts, and accelerating scientific discoveries could ensure that the fruits of open science processes and products are more accessible and equitably distributed.

It is now time to consider how much faster and farther the open science movement could go with more coordination. What efficiencies might be realized if disparate efforts could better harmonize across geographies, disciplines, and sectors? How would an intentional, systems-level approach to aligning incentives, infrastructure, training, and other key components of a rationally functioning research ecosystem advance the wider goals of the movement? Streamlining research processes, reducing duplication of efforts, and accelerating scientific discoveries could ensure that the fruits of open science processes and products are more accessible and equitably distributed…(More)”

UNESCO’s Quest to Save the World’s Intangible Heritage

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Julian Lucas: “For decades, the organization has maintained a system that protects everything from Ukrainian borscht to Jamaican reggae. But what does it mean to “safeguard” living culture?…On December 7th, at a safari resort in Kasane, Botswana, Ukraine briefed the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on an endangered national treasure. It wasn’t a monastery menaced by air strikes. Nor was it any of the paintings, rare books, or other antiquities seized by Russian troops. It was borscht, a beet soup popular for centuries across Eastern Europe. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, in February, 2022—as fields burned, restaurants shuttered, and expert cooks fled their homes—Kyiv successfully petitioned UNESCO to add its culture of borscht-making to the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. Now, despite setbacks on the battlefield, the state of the soup was strong. A Ukrainian official reported on her government’s new borscht-related initiatives, such as hosting gastronomic festivals and inventorying vulnerable recipes. She looked forward to borscht’s graduation from Urgent Safeguarding to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (I.C.H.) of Humanity—which grew, that session, to include Italian opera singing, Bangladeshi rickshaw painting, Angolan sand art, and Peruvian ceviche…(More)”.

Ukrainians Are Using an App to Return Home

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Yuliya Panfil and Allison Price: “Two years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the human toll continues to mount. At least 11 million people have been displaced by heavy bombing, drone strikes, and combat, and well over a million homes have been damaged or destroyed. But just miles from the front lines of what is a conventional land invasion, something decidedly unconventional has been deployed to help restore Ukrainian communities.

Thousands of families whose homes have been hit by Russian shelling are using their smartphones to file compensation claims, access government funds, and begin to rebuild their homes. This innovation is part of eRecovery, the world’s first-ever example of a government compensation program for damaged or destroyed homes rolled out digitally, at scale, in the midst of a war. It’s one of the ways in which Ukraine’s tech-savvy government and populace have leaned into digital solutions to help counter Russian aggression with resilience and a speedier approach to reconstruction and recovery.

According to Ukraine’s Housing, Land and Property Technical Working Group, since its launch last summer eRecovery has processed more than 83,000 compensation claims for damaged or destroyed property and paid out more than 45,000. In addition, more than half a million Ukrainians have taken the first step in the compensation process by filing a property damage report through Ukraine’s e-government platform, Diia. eRecovery’s potential to transform the way governments get people back into their homes following a war, natural disaster, or other calamity is hard to overstate…(More)”.

Surveilling Alone

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Christine Rosen: “When Jane Jacobs, author of the 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, outlined the qualities of successful neighborhoods, she included “eyes on the street,” or, as she described this, the “eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street,” including shopkeepers and residents going about their daily routines. Not every neighborhood enjoyed the benefit of this informal sense of community, of course, but it was widely seen to be desirable. What Jacobs understood is that the combined impact of many local people practicing normal levels of awareness in their neighborhoods on any given day is surprisingly effective for community-building, with the added benefit of building trust and deterring crime.

Jacobs’s championing of these “natural proprietors of the street” was a response to a mid-century concern that aggressive city planning would eradicate the vibrant experience of neighborhoods like her own, the Village in New York City. Jacobs famously took on “master planner” Robert Moses after he proposed building an expressway through Lower Manhattan, a scheme that, had it succeeded, would have destroyed Washington Square Park and the Village, and turned neighborhoods around SoHo into highway underpasses. For Jacobs and her fellow citizen activists, the efficiency of the proposed highway was not enough to justify eliminating bustling sidewalks and streets, where people played a crucial role in maintaining the health and order of their communities.

Today, a different form of efficient design is eliminating “eyes on the street” — by replacing them with technological ones. The proliferation of neighborhood surveillance technologies such as Ring cameras and digital neighborhood-watch platforms and apps such as Nextdoor and Citizen have freed us from the constraints of having to be physically present to monitor our homes and streets. Jacobs’s “eyes on the street” are now cameras on many homes, and the everyday interactions between neighbors and strangers are now a network of cameras and platforms that promise to put “neighborhood security in your hands,” as the Ring Neighbors app puts it.

Inside our homes, we monitor ourselves and our family members with equal zeal, making use of video baby monitors, GPS-tracking software for children’s smartphones (or for covert surveillance by a suspicious spouse), and “smart” speakers that are always listening and often recording when they shouldn’t. A new generation of domestic robots, such as Amazon’s Astro, combines several of these features into a roving service-machine always at your beck and call around the house and ever watchful of its security when you are away…(More)”.

Can AI mediate conflict better than humans?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Virginia Pietromarchi: “Diplomats whizzing around the globe. Hush-hush meetings, often never made public. For centuries, the art of conflict mediation has relied on nuanced human skills: from elements as simple as how to make eye contact and listen carefully to detecting shifts in emotions and subtle signals from opponents.

Now, a growing set of entrepreneurs and experts are pitching a dramatic new set of tools into the world of dispute resolution – relying increasingly on artificial intelligence (AI).

“Groundbreaking technological advancements are revolutionising the frontier of peace and mediation,” said Sama al-Hamdani, programme director of Hala System, a private company using AI and data analysis to gather unencrypted intelligence in conflict zones, among other war-related tasks.

“We are witnessing an era where AI transforms mediators into powerhouses of efficiency and insight,” al-Hamdani said.

The researcher is one of thousands of speakers participating in the Web Summit in Doha, Qatar, where digital conflict mediation is on the agenda. The four-day summit started on February 26 and concludes on Thursday, February 29.

Already, say experts, digital solutions have proven effective in complex diplomacy. At the peak of the COVID-19 restrictions, mediators were not able to travel for in-person meetings with their interlocutors.

The solution? Use remote communication software Skype to facilitate negotiations, as then-United States envoy Zalmay Khalilzad did for the Qatar-brokered talks between the US and the Taliban in 2020.

For generations, power brokers would gather behind doors to make decisions affecting people far and wide. Digital technologies can now allow the process to be relatively more inclusive.

This is what Stephanie Williams, special representative of the United Nations’ chief in Libya, did in 2021 when she used a hybrid model integrating personal and digital interactions as she led mediation efforts to establish a roadmap towards elections. That strategy helped her speak to people living in areas deemed too dangerous to travel to. The UN estimates that Williams managed to reach one million Libyans.

However, practitioners are now growing interested in the use of technology beyond online consultations…(More)”

Forced to Change: Tech Giants Bow to Global Onslaught of Rules

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Adam Satariano, and David McCabe: “By Thursday, Google will have changed how it displays certain search results. Microsoft will no longer force Windows customers to use its Bing internet search tool. And Apple will give iPhone and iPad users access to rival app stores and payment systems for the first time.

The tech giants have been preparing ahead of a Wednesday deadline to comply with a new European Union law intended to increase competition in the digital economy. The law, called the Digital Markets Act, requires the biggest tech companies to overhaul how some of their products work so smaller rivals can gain more access to their users.

Those changes are some of the most visible shifts that Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta and others are making in response to a wave of new regulations and laws around the world. In the United States, some of the tech behemoths have said they will abandon practices that are the subject of federal antitrust investigations. Apple, for one, is making it easier for Android users to interact with its iMessage product, a topic that the Justice Department has been investigating.

“This is a turning point,” said Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission executive vice president in Brussels, who spent much of the past decade battling with tech giants. “Self-regulation is over.”

For decades, Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta barreled forward with few rules and limits. As their power, riches and reach grew, a groundswell of regulatory activity, lawmaking and legal cases sprang up against them in Europe, the United States, China, India, Canada, South Korea and Australia. Now that global tipping point for reining in the largest tech companies has finally tipped.

The companies have been forced to alter the everyday technology they offer, including devices and features of their social media services, which have been especially noticeable to users in Europe. The firms are also making consequential shifts that are less visible, to their business models, deal making and data-sharing practices, for example.

The degree of change is evident at Apple. While the Silicon Valley company once offered its App Store as a unified marketplace around the world, it now has different rules for App Store developers in South Korea, the European Union and the United States because of new laws and court rulings. The company dropped the proprietary design of an iPhone charger because of another E.U. law, meaning future iPhones will have a charger that works with non-Apple devices…(More)”.

What Happens to Your Sensitive Data When a Data Broker Goes Bankrupt?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jon Keegan: “In 2021, a company specializing in collecting and selling location data called Near bragged that it was “The World’s Largest Dataset of People’s Behavior in the Real-World,” with data representing “1.6B people across 44 countries.” Last year the company went public with a valuation of $1 billion (via a SPAC). Seven months later it filed for bankruptcy and has agreed to sell the company.

But for the “1.6B people” that Near said its data represents, the important question is: What happens to Near’s mountain of location data? Any company could gain access to it through purchasing the company’s assets.

The prospect of this data, including Near’s collection of location data from sensitive locations such as abortion clinics, being sold off in bankruptcy has raised alarms in Congress. Last week, Sen. Ron Wyden wrote the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) urging the agency to “protect consumers and investors from the outrageous conduct” of Near, citing his office’s investigation into the India-based company. 

Wyden’s letter also urged the FTC “to intervene in Near’s bankruptcy proceedings to ensure that all location and device data held by Near about Americans is promptly destroyed and is not sold off, including to another data broker.” The FTC took such an action in 2010 to block the use of 11 years worth of subscriber personal data during the bankruptcy proceedings of the XY Magazine, which was oriented to young gay men. The agency requested that the data be destroyed to prevent its misuse.

Wyden’s investigation was spurred by a May 2023 Wall Street Journal report that Near had licensed location data to the anti-abortion group Veritas Society so it could target ads to visitors of Planned Parenthood clinics and attempt to dissuade women from seeking abortions. Wyden’s investigation revealed that the group’s geofencing campaign focused on 600 Planned Parenthood clinics in 48 states. The Journal also revealed that Near had been selling its location data to the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies...(More)”.