Paper by Richard M. Re and Alicia Solow-Niederman: “Artificial intelligence, or AI, promises to assist, modify, and replace human decision-making, including in court. AI already supports many aspects of how judges decide cases, and the prospect of “robot judges” suddenly seems plausible—even imminent. This Article argues that AI adjudication will profoundly affect the adjudicatory values held by legal actors as well as the public at large. The impact is likely to be greatest in areas, including criminal justice and appellate decision-making, where “equitable justice,” or discretionary moral judgment, is frequently considered paramount. By offering efficiency and at least an appearance of impartiality, AI adjudication will both foster and benefit from a turn toward “codified justice,” an adjudicatory paradigm that favors standardization above discretion. Further, AI adjudication will generate a range of concerns relating to its tendency to make the legal system more incomprehensible, data-based, alienating, and disillusioning. And potential responses, such as crafting a division of labor between human and AI adjudicators, each pose their own challenges. The single most promising response is for the government to play a greater role in structuring the emerging market for AI justice, but auspicious reform proposals would borrow several interrelated approaches. Similar dynamics will likely extend to other aspects of government, such that choices about how to incorporate AI in the judiciary will inform the future path of AI development more broadly….(More)”.
Capacities for urban transformations governance and the case of New York City
Paper by Katharina Hölscher et al: “The narrative of urban sustainability transformations epitomises the hope that urban governance can create the conditions to plan and govern cities in a way that they contribute to local and global sustainability and resilience. So far, urban governance is not delivering: novel governance approaches are emerging in cities worldwide, yet are unable to transform conventional policymaking and planning to allow for innovative, co-beneficial and long-term solutions and actions to emerge and institutionalise. We present a capacities framework for urban transformations governance, starting from the need to fulfil distinct output functions (‘what needs to happen’) for mobilising and influencing urban transformation dynamics. The framework helps to diagnose and inform urban governance for responding to disturbances (stewarding capacity), phasing-out drivers of path-dependency (unlocking capacity), creating and embedding novelties (transformative capacity) and coordinating multi-actor processes (orchestrating capacity). Our case study of climate governance in New York City exemplifies the framework’s applicability and explanatory power to identify conditions and activities facilitating transformation (governance), and to reveal gaps and barriers of these vis-à-vis the existing governance regime. Our framework thereby functions as a tool to explore what new forms of urban transformation governance are emerging, how effective these are, and how to strengthen capacities….(More)”.
Datafication, development and marginalised urban communities: an applied data justice framework
Paper by Richard Heeks et al: “The role of data within international development is rapidly expanding. However, the recency of this phenomenon means analysis has been lagging; particularly, analysis of broader impacts of real-world initiatives. Addressing this gap through a focus on data’s increasing presence in urban development, this paper makes two contributions. First – drawing from the emerging literature on ‘data justice’ – it presents an explicit, systematic and comprehensive new framework that can be used for analysis of datafication. Second, it applies the framework to four mapping initiatives in cities of the global South. These initiatives capture and visualise new data about marginalised communities: residents living in slums and other informal settlements about whom data has traditionally been lacking. Analysing across procedural, rights, instrumental and structural dimensions, it finds these initiatives deliver real incremental gains for their target communities. But it is external actors and wealthier communities that gain more; thus, increasing relative inequality….(More)”.
The Ethics of Big Data Applications in the Consumer Sector
Paper by Markus Christen et al : “Business applications relying on processing of large amounts of heterogeneous data (Big Data) are considered to be key drivers of innovation in the digital economy. However, these applications also pose ethical issues that may undermine the credibility of data-driven businesses. In our contribution, we discuss ethical problems that are associated with Big Data such as: How are core values like autonomy, privacy, and solidarity affected in a Big Data world? Are some data a public good? Or: Are we obliged to divulge personal data to a certain degree in order to make the society more secure or more efficient?
We answer those questions by first outlining the ethical topics that are discussed in the scientific literature and the lay media using a bibliometric approach. Second, referring to the results of expert interviews and workshops with practitioners, we identify core norms and values affected by Big Data applications—autonomy, equality, fairness, freedom, privacy, property-rights, solidarity, and transparency—and outline how they are exemplified in examples of Big Data consumer applications, for example, in terms of informational self-determination, non-discrimination, or free opinion formation. Based on use cases such as personalized advertising, individual pricing, or credit risk management we discuss the process of balancing such values in order to identify legitimate, questionable, and unacceptable Big Data applications from an ethics point of view. We close with recommendations on how practitioners working in applied data science can deal with ethical issues of Big Data….(More)”.
The clinician crowdsourcing challenge: using participatory design to seed implementation strategies
Paper by Rebecca E. Stewart et al: “In healthcare settings, system and organization leaders often control the selection and design of implementation strategies even though frontline workers may have the most intimate understanding of the care delivery process, and factors that optimize and constrain evidence-based practice implementation within the local system. Innovation tournaments, a structured participatory design strategy to crowdsource ideas, are a promising approach to participatory design that may increase the effectiveness of implementation strategies by involving end users (i.e., clinicians). We utilized a system-wide innovation tournament to garner ideas from clinicians about how to enhance the use of evidence-based practices (EBPs) within a large public behavioral health system…(More)”
Study finds that a GPS outage would cost $1 billion per day
Eric Berger at Ars Technica: “….one of the most comprehensive studies on the subject has assessed the value of this GPS technology to the US economy and examined what effect a 30-day outage would have—whether it’s due to a severe space weather event or “nefarious activity by a bad actor.” The study was sponsored by the US government’s National Institutes of Standards and Technology and performed by a North Carolina-based research organization named RTI International.
Economic effect
As part of the analysis, researchers spoke to more than 200 experts in the use of GPS technology for various services, from agriculture to the positioning of offshore drilling rigs to location services for delivery drivers. (If they’d spoken to me, I’d have said the value of using GPS to navigate Los Angeles freeways and side streets was incalculable). The study covered a period from 1984, when the nascent GPS network was first opened to commercial use, through 2017. It found that GPS has generated an estimated $1.4 trillion in economic benefits during that time period.
The researchers found that the largest benefit, valued at $685.9 billion, came in the “telecommunications” category, including improved reliability and bandwidth utilization for wireless networks. Telematics (efficiency gains, cost reductions, and environmental benefits through improved vehicle dispatch and navigation) ranked as the second most valuable category at $325 billion. Location-based services on smartphones was third, valued at $215 billion.
Notably, the value of GPS technology to the US economy is growing. According to the study, 90 percent of the technology’s financial impact has come since just 2010, or just 20 percent of the study period. Some sectors of the economy are only beginning to realize the value of GPS technology, or are identifying new uses for it, the report says, indicating that its value as a platform for innovation will continue to grow.
Outage impact
In the case of some adverse event leading to a widespread outage, the study estimates that the loss of GPS service would have a $1 billion per-day impact, although the authors acknowledge this is at best a rough estimate. It would likely be higher during the planting season of April and May, when farmers are highly reliant on GPS technology for information about their fields.
To assess the effect of an outage, the study looked at several different variables. Among them was “precision timing” that enables a number of wireless services, including the synchronization of traffic between carrier networks, wireless handoff between base stations, and billing management. Moreover, higher levels of precision timing enable higher bandwidth and provide access to more devices. (For example, the implementation of 4G LTE technology would have been impossible without GPS technology)….(More)”
Virtuous and vicious circles in the data life-cycle
Paper by Elizabeth Yakel, Ixchel M. Faniel, and Zachary J. Maiorana: “In June 2014, ‘Data sharing reveals complexity in the westward spread of domestic animals across Neolithic Turkey’, was published in PLoS One (Arbuckle et al. 2014). In this article, twenty-three authors, all zooarchaeologists, representing seventeen different archaeological sites in Turkey investigated the domestication of animals across Neolithic southwest Asia, a pivotal era of change in the region’s economy. The PLoS One article originated in a unique data sharing, curation, and reuse project in which a majority of the authors agreed to share their data and perform analyses across the aggregated datasets. The extent of data sharing and the breadth of data reuse and collaboration were previously unprecedented in archaeology. In the present article, we conduct a case study of the collaboration leading to the development of the PLoS One article. In particular, we focus on the data sharing, data curation, and data reuse practices exercised during the project in order to investigate how different phases in the data life-cycle affected each other.
Studies of data practices have generally engaged issues from the singular perspective of data producers, sharers, curators, or reusers. Furthermore, past studies have tended to focus on one aspect of the life-cycle (production, sharing, curation, reuse, etc.). A notable exception is Carlson and Anderson’s (2007) comparative case study of four research projects which discusses the life-cycle of data from production through sharing with an eye towards reuse. However, that study primarily addresses the process of data sharing. While we see from their research that data producers’ and curators’ decisions and actions regarding data are tightly coupled and have future consequences, those consequences are not fully explicated since the authors do not discuss reuse in depth.
Taking a perspective that captures the trajectory of data, our case study discusses actions and their consequences throughout the data life-cycle. Our research theme explores how different stakeholders and their work practices positively and/or negatively affected other phases of the life-cycle. More specifically, we focus on data production practices and data selection decisions made during data sharing as these have frequent and diverse consequences for other life-cycle phases in our case study. We address the following research questions:
- How do different aspects of data production positively and negatively impact other phases in the life-cycle?
- How do data selection decisions during sharing positively and negatively impact other phases in the life-cycle?
- How can the work of data curators intervene to reinforce positive actions or mitigate negative actions?…(More)”
From Planning to Prototypes: New Ways of Seeing Like a State
Fleur Johns at Modern Law Review: “All states have pursued what James C. Scott characterised as modernist projects of legibility and simplification: maps, censuses, national economic plans and related legislative programs. Many, including Scott, have pointed out blindspots embedded in these tools. As such criticism persists, however, the synoptic style of law and development has changed. Governments, NGOs and international agencies now aspire to draw upon immense repositories of digital data. Modes of analysis too have changed. No longer is legibility a precondition for action. Law‐ and policy‐making are being informed by business development methods that prefer prototypes over plans. States and international institutions continue to plan, but also seek insight from the release of minimally viable policy mock‐ups. Familiar critiques of law and development work, and arguments for its reform, have limited purchase on these practices, Scott’s included. Effective critical intervention in this field today requires careful attention to be paid to these emergent patterns of practice…(More)”.
How not to conduct a consultation – and why asking the public is not always such a great idea
Agnes Batory & Sara Svensson at Policy and Politics: “Involving people in policy-making is generally a good thing. Policy-makers themselves often pay at least lip-service to the importance of giving citizens a say. In the academic literature, participatory governance has been, with some exaggeration, almost universally hailed as a panacea to all ills in Western democracies. In particular, it is advocated as a way to remedy the alienation of voters from politicians who seem to be oblivious to the concerns of the common man and woman, with an ensuing decline in public trust in government. Representation by political parties is ridden with problems, so the argument goes, and in any case it is overly focused on the act of voting in elections – a one-off event once every few years which limits citizens’ ability to control the policy agenda. On the other hand, various forms of public participation are expected to educate citizens, help develop a civic culture, and boost the legitimacy of decision-making. Consequently, practices to ensure that citizens can provide direct input into policy-making are to be welcomed on both pragmatic and normative grounds.
I do not disagree with these generally positive expectations. However, the main objective of my recent article in Policy and Politics, co-authored with Sara Svensson, is to inject a dose of healthy scepticism into the debate or, more precisely, to show that there are circumstances in which public consultations will achieve anything but greater legitimacy and better policy-outcomes. We do this partly by discussing the more questionable assumptions in the participatory governance literature, and partly by examining a recent, glaring example of the misuse, and abuse, of popular input….(More)”.
AI and the Global South: Designing for Other Worlds
Chapter by Chinmayi Arun in Markus D. Dubber, Frank Pasquale, and Sunit Das (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI: “This chapter is about the ways in which AI affects, and will continue to affect, the Global South. It highlights why the design and deployment of AI in the South should concern us.
Towards this, it discusses what is meant by the South. The term has a history connected with the ‘Third World’ and has referred to countries that share post-colonial history and certain development goals. However scholars have expanded and refined on it to include different kinds of marginal, disenfranchised populations such that the South is now a plural concept – there are Souths.
The risks of the ways in which AI affects Southern populations include concerns of discrimination, bias, oppression, exclusion and bad design. These can be exacerbated in the context of vulnerable populations, especially those without access to human rights law or institutional remedies. This Chapter outlines these risks as well as the international human rights law that is applicable. It argues that a human rights, centric, inclusive, empowering context-driven approach is necessary….(More)”.