Ronan Farrow at the New Yorker: “…Commercial spyware has grown into an industry estimated to be worth twelve billion dollars. It is largely unregulated and increasingly controversial. In recent years, investigations by the Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have revealed the presence of Pegasus on the phones of politicians, activists, and dissidents under repressive regimes. An analysis by Forensic Architecture, a research group at the University of London, has linked Pegasus to three hundred acts of physical violence. It has been used to target members of Rwanda’s opposition party and journalists exposing corruption in El Salvador. In Mexico, it... (More >)
How Smart Tech Tried to Solve the Mental Health Crisis and Only Made It Worse
Article by Emma Bedor Hiland: “Crisis Text Line was supposed to be the exception. Skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, and mental distress over the last decade demanded new, innovative solutions. The non-profit organization was founded in 2013 with the mission of providing free mental health text messaging services and crisis intervention tools. It seemed like the right moment to use technology to make the world a better place. Over the following years, the accolades and praise the platform received reflected its success. But their sterling reputation was tarnished overnight at the beginning of 2022 when Politico published an investigation... (More >)
A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?
Steven Johnson at the New York Times: “You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold winter’s night. Perhaps you have a mug of tea in hand, perhaps something stronger. You open a magazine to an article you’ve been meaning to read. The title suggested a story about a promising — but also potentially dangerous — new technology on the cusp of becoming mainstream, and after reading only a few sentences, you find yourself pulled into the story. A revolution is coming in machine intelligence, the author argues, and we need, as a society, to... (More >)
Should we get rid of the scientific paper?
Article by Stuart Ritchie: “But although the internet has transformed the way we read it, the overall system for how we publish science remains largely unchanged. We still have scientific papers; we still send them off to peer reviewers; we still have editors who give the ultimate thumbs up or down as to whether a paper is published in their journal. This system comes with big problems. Chief among them is the issue of publication bias: reviewers and editors are more likely to give a scientific paper a good write-up and publish it in their journal if it reports... (More >)
Cities Take the Lead in Setting Rules Around How AI Is Used
Jackie Snow at the Wall Street Journal: “As cities and states roll out algorithms to help them provide services like policing and traffic management, they are also racing to come up with policies for using this new technology. AI, at its worst, can disadvantage already marginalized groups, adding to human-driven bias in hiring, policing and other areas. And its decisions can often be opaque—making it difficult to tell how to fix that bias, as well as other problems. (The Wall Street Journal discussed calls for regulation of AI, or at least greater transparency about how the systems work, with... (More >)
Russia Is Leaking Data Like a Sieve
Matt Burgess at Wired: “Names, birthdays, passport numbers, job titles—the personal information goes on for pages and looks like any typical data breach. But this data set is very different. It allegedly contains the personal information of 1,600 Russian troops who served in Bucha, a Ukrainian city devastated during Russia’s war and the scene of multiple potential war crimes. The data set is not the only one. Another allegedly contains the names and contact details of 620 Russian spies who are registered to work at the Moscow office of the FSB, the country’s main security agency. Neither set of... (More >)
The Power of Narrative
Essay by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Mallerett: “…The expression “failure of imagination” captures this by describing the expectation that future opportunities and risks will resemble those of the past. Novelist Graham Greene used it in The Power and the Glory, but the 9/11 Commission made it popular by invoking it as the main reason why intelligence agencies had failed to anticipate the “unimaginable” events of that day. Ever since, the expression has been associated with situations in which strategic thinking and risk management are stuck in unimaginative and reactive thinking. Considering today’s wide and interdependent array of risks, we... (More >)
Opening up Science—to Skeptics
Essay by Rohan R. Arcot and Hunter Gehlbach: “Recently, the soaring trajectory of science skepticism seems to be rivaled only by global temperatures. Empirically established facts—around vaccines, elections, climate science, and the like—face potent headwinds. Despite the scientific consensus on these issues, much of the public remains unconvinced. In turn, science skepticism threatens our health, the health of our democracy, and the health of our planet. The research community is no stranger to skepticism. Its own members have been questioning the integrity of many scientific findings with particular intensity of late. In response, we have seen a swell of... (More >)
Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’
Article by Taylor Lorenz: “Algospeak” is becoming increasingly common across the Internet as people seek to bypass content moderation filters on social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Twitch. Algospeak refers to code words or turns of phrase users have adopted in an effort to create a brand-safe lexicon that will avoid getting their posts removed or down-ranked by content moderation systems. For instance, in many online videos, it’s common to say “unalive” rather than “dead,” “SA” instead of “sexual assault,” or “spicy eggplant” instead of “vibrator.” As the pandemic pushed more people to communicate and express... (More >)
Facial Recognition Goes to War
Kashmir Hill at the New York Times: “In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine and images of the devastation wrought there flooded the news, Hoan Ton-That, the chief executive of the facial recognition company Clearview AI, began thinking about how he could get involved. He believed his company’s technology could offer clarity in complex situations in the war. “I remember seeing videos of captured Russian soldiers and Russia claiming they were actors,” Mr. Ton-That said. “I thought if Ukrainians could use Clearview, they could get more information to verify their identities.” In early March, he reached out to people... (More >)
