Overview: Politics

"Could AI itself be used to imagine and build new institutions, so we can better collaborate, govern, and live together?... hope to inspire and engage researchers and practitioners to build AI that improves our societal institutions."The site includes 8 (so far) “Project Cards that showcase ideas for projects that have come out of our wo…

At an AI conference, Jeff Jarvis "knew I was in the right place when I heard AGI brought up and quickly dismissed... I call bullshit... large language models might prove to be a parlor trick". The rest of the conference focused on "frameworks for discussion of responsible use of AI".Benefits - for some, AI can:"raise the f…

Asks: could LLMs be used to "create tools that sift and summarize scientific evidence for policymaking... [for] knowledge brokers providing presidents, prime ministers, civil servants and politicians with up-to-date information on how science and technology intersects with societal issues... [who must] nimbly navigate ... millions of scientif…

One of my favourite writers in this area on AGI risks. "It is the rise of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., that worries the experts... Yet a nascent A.G.I. lobby of academics, investors and entrepreneurs counter that, once made safe, A.G.I. would be a boon to civilization... beholden to an ideology that views this new technology as…

"an initial analysis of a growing movement ... to make key machine learning tools and technologies open and shared. “Open Artificial Intelligence”...BLOOM is a large language model released under RAIL – a new copyright license that combines an Open Access approach to licensing with behavioral restrictions aimed to enforce a vision of responsi…

"You Are Not a Parrot and a chatbot is not a human" - an interview/profile of Emily M. Bender, the "computational linguist at the University of Washington ... [who] co-wrote the octopus paper... to illustrate what ... LLMs ... can and cannot do"The paper: "Climbing Towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Ag…

"I first decided to try scribing the Betaworx Render session on Plexus using Obsidian and try publishing it via GitHub (context). That didn't work, so when I saw [[rtnf md]] I thought I'd give it a whirl... the idea [of Plexus] is simple:post your thoughts into a defined shared brain on Plexus - eg : https://render.plexus.earth/the …

A neural network to help web content authors efficiently and completely characterise their content using the site taxonomy. Accuracy improves with use.

"forecasting the future is a complex and absolutely critical job. So how do you do it—and what comes next?"Fascinating series of short interviews with futurists. Some selected quotes:"When it comes to the future, you have two choices: ... build a great big wall to keep out all the bad news. Or you can build windmills and harness the…

German researchers studying "computational linguistics, hateful and oppressive speech and how social media exacerbates it studied ... five years of discussion between [Trump] supporters on Telegram, tracking how participants “gradually went from discussing governmental overthrow as a theoretical possibility to planning the January 6, 2021 Cap…

The “Brussels effect:... When the European Union comes up with some new tech regulation, it can quickly spread around the world"...To draft its proposed AI regulatory approach, the EC "created a 52-member “high-level expert group” ... collected further input via an “AI alliance” ... published a white paper" to which 1,250 groups a…

For businesses, delivering good customer service is ... imperative... for government entities to enhance the “citizen experience”... may be just as important...Governments... empathy economy model ... put residents and citizens at the core ... empathy economy is based on ... value created by AI and other innovations detect and simulate human emoti…

The von der Leyen Commission’s much anticipated White Paper ... sustained effort to forge a distinctive EU brand of AI... lack of focus ... on human rights... while there are multiple centres of engineering excellence... the raw investment numbers tell a demanding story...2016... EU investment was 3.2 bn euro. In North America, 12.1 bn... goal wit…

for manipulating public opinion... automation and artificial intelligence “can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than people.”...If disinformation in 2016 was characterized by Macedonian spammers... Russian trolls... 2020 is shaping up to be the year communications pros for hire provide sophisticated online propaganda operations .…

companies have begun to self-regulate by trying to set up their own “AI ethics” initiatives ... led to a fragmented landscape of efforts ... not yet had demonstrable outcomes beyond igniting a debate ... these ethics boards and principles lacked teeth... Chinese companies are generally more concerned with solving real-world problems ... rather th…

Most criticisms lodged against the content creators that chose to work with the platforms are made with the benefit of hindsight... the decision many publishers made to close down their comment sections should be considered one of the industry’s worst blunders.... editors looked down into their article comments sections and did not like what they …

Major tech corporations have launched AI “ethics” boards that not only lack diversity, but sometimes include powerful people with interests that don’t align with the ethics mission... Partnership on AI... by Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft, does not appear to have black board members or staff ... a board dominated by men.. empty PR sp…

This working document constitutes a draft of the AI Ethics Guidelines presented by the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG)... The consultation ended on 1 February 2019 with over 500 comments received. These comments are currently being analysed

reddit community called Change My View ... a ready-made natural experiment ... feed it into programs ... to understand the back-and-forth between human beings ... discovered two things: what kind of arguments are most likely to change people’s minds, and what kinds of minds are most likely to be changed. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ : po…

Technology has altered the foundations of news and media, and as trust in media continues to decline, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms have come to play a critical role not only as threats to the integrity and quality of media, but also as a source of potential solutions. The core threats to information quality associated …

With 700 or 800 million Chinese internet users and fewer data protection rules, China is as rich in data as the Gulf States are in oil... Chinese commentators have embraced the idea of a coming singularity... AI development will be conducted by AI itself, creating exponential feedback ... the human mind will be unable to keep pace with robotized w…

“We are so screwed it's beyond what most of us can imagine... And depending how far you look into the future it just gets worse.”... a slew of slick, easy-to-use, and eventually seamless technological tools for manipulating perception and falsifying reality... They’re running war game–style disaster scenarios based on technologies that have begun …

algorithmic systems don’t simply cost money to implement. They cost money to maintain. They cost money to audit. They cost money to evolve ... divert taxpayer money from direct services, to lining the pockets of for-profit entities under the illusion of helping people....a diversion of liability ... those in powerful positions blame the algorithms…

Over the coming years, we’ll see the BBC develop and roll-out more and more machine learning algorithms for storing, retrieving, tagging and possibly even creating content.... What if we lock our audiences in to what they just want to hear, never challenging them? ... Should the algorithms we use be open to public scrutiny?... inform our own thin…

AI is increasingly being used to support public participation in policy. While they offer a lot, they could invisibly skew policy if used carelessly.- 3rd post in preparation for my EWRC 2017 workshop on online communities and public participation in policy 

I was particularly ashamed of the way that the AAA ratings, which were in some sense a mathematical promise of safety, had been actually just lies, mathematical lies... like a weaponized mathematics ... actually people don’t want to know what their actual risk ... mathematics ... was being used ... so that people could go on doing essentially corr…

Zuckerberg uses abstract language in his memo—he wants Facebook to develop “the social infrastructure for community,” he writes—but what he’s really describing is building a media company with classic journalistic goals... “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”,,,an assumption that news... will con…

our current misinformation problem is only the tip of a massive iceberg — and this looming disaster starts with AI...when we see a picture that seems very unlikely, we naturally assume that it is photoshopped... with AI, we are heading toward a world where this will be the case with every form of media: text, voice, video, etc.

Over the past week in our Understanding AI series, we heard from a group of professionals exploring the impacts of AI... Sales coaches are valued, highly experienced, and well-paid. It’s hard to believe that a machine could potentially put them out of work, and yet…look at the data. And Sales’ counterparts over in Marketing are hardly any safer...…

With a few paragraphs buried in... bureaucrat-speak, the GDPR also restricts what the EU calls “automated individual decision-making.” ... what neural networks do... prohibit any automated decision that “significantly affects” EU citizens... provides ... a “right to explanation.” ... the option of reviewing how a particular service made a partic…