April 2019 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Opinion | Why You Are No Longer Safe in the Crowd - The New York Times
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 17, 2019

April 17, 2019

Once, it was easy to be obscure. Technology has ended that. By Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger Dr. Hartzog is a professor of law and computer science. Dr. Selinger is a professor of philosophy. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/data-privacy.html (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Brookings Report: "Credit denial in the age of AI"
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 17, 2019

April 17, 2019

Report <https://www.brookings.edu/search/?post_type=research> Credit denial in the age of AI Aaron Klein <https://www.brookings.edu/experts/aaron-klein/> Thursday, April 11, 2019 *Editor's Note:* /This report is part of "//A Blueprint for the Future of AI <https://www.brookings.edu/series/a-blueprint-for-the-future-of-ai/>//," a series from the Brookings Institution that analyzes the new challenges and potential policy solutions introduced by artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies./ Banks have been in the business of deciding who is eligible for credit for centuries. But in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and big data, digital technologies have the potential to transform credit allocation in positive as well as negative directions. Given the mix of possible societal ramifications, policymakers must consider what practices are and are not permissible and what legal and regulatory structures are necessary to protect consumers against unfair or discriminatory lending practices. In this paper, I review the history of credit and the risks of discriminatory practices. I discuss how AI alters the dynamics of credit denials and what policymakers and banking officials can do to safeguard consumer lending. AI has the potential to alter credit practices in transformative ways and it is important to ensure that this happens in a safe and prudent manner. […] Continua qui: https://www.brookings.edu/research/credit-denial-in-the-age-of-ai/

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Germany: Upload Filters Can Only Be Prevented "As Far As Possible" - TorrentFreak
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 17, 2019

April 17, 2019

Much of the debate preceding the vote on the new EU Copyright Directive had proponents stating that since so-called "upload filters" weren't explicitly mentioned in the text, opponents must be scaremongering to suggest they will become a reality. In a statement in the wake of Monday's Council vote, Germany now says that not only are they "likely" but they can only be prevented "as far as possible." https://torrentfreak.com/germany-upload-filters-can-only-be-prevented-as-fa… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Facebook has created an insanely detailed map of where everyone in Africa lives
by Antonio Vetro' April 17, 2019

April 17, 2019

Lavoro di cui si è parlato circa di due settimane fa, ma ho notato solamente oggi. Mi sembra non sia stato segnalato in lista, chiedo venia in caso contrario. Succo del lavoro: “A census data set is a set of geographical polygons, you know, so like the outline of some city district and a number of people in there,” says James Gill, a Facebook engineer who worked on the project. “What we do is we find locations of buildings. To a good approximation, people live in buildings, and not in fields and forest and mountains. So instead of placing the people in the census district everywhere, we only place them where there are buildings.” Aid workers obviously know this intuitively. The maps help them show up more prepared and ensure no one gets missed. Articolo intero: https://www.fastcompany.com/90331895/facebook-has-created-an-insanely-detai… av

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NYT - we built an "unbelievable" (but legal) facial recognition machine
by Luigi Scorca April 17, 2019

April 17, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/16/opinion/facial-recognition-n… Luigi

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The revolution need not be automated | World Economic Forum
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 16, 2019

April 16, 2019

03 Apr 2019 Daron Acemoglu Professor of Applied Economics, Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Pascual Restrepo Postdoctoral fellow, Cowles Foundation, Yale University For centuries after the Industrial Revolution, automation did not hinder wage and employment growth, because it was accompanied by new technologies geared toward maintaining the role of human labor in value creation. But in the era of artificial intelligence, it will be up to policymakers to ensure that the pattern continues. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ai-automation-labor-productivi… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Programming for the Expression of Ideas
by Giacomo Tesio April 16, 2019

April 16, 2019

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Expression-of-Ideas The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think.

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Former Mozilla exec: Google has sabotaged Firefox for years
by Giacomo Tesio April 16, 2019

April 16, 2019

https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-fire… Johnathan Nightingale, a former General Manager and Vice President of the Firefox group at Mozilla, described these issues as "oopses." "When I started at Mozilla in 2007 there was no Google Chrome, and most folks we spoke with inside [Google] were Firefox fans," Nightingale recollected in a Twitter thread on Saturday. "When Chrome launched things got complicated, but not in the way you might expect. They had a competing product now, but they didn't cut ties, break our search deal - nothing like that. In fact, the story we kept hearing was, 'We're on the same side. We want the same things'," the former Mozilla exec said. "I think our friends inside Google genuinely believed that. At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did. Their product and design folks made many decisions very similarly, and we learned from watching each other. "But Google as a whole is very different than individual googlers," Nightingale said. "Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'," he said. "All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say 'hey what gives?' And every time, they'd say, 'oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks.' "Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?" "I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done," Nightingale said. [...] In July 2018, Mozilla Program Manager Chris Peterson accused Google of intentionally slowing down YouTube performance on Firefox. He revealed that both Firefox and Edge were superior when loading YouTube content when compared to Chrome, and in order to counteract this performance issue, Google switched to using a JavaScript library for YouTube that they knew wasn't supported by Firefox.

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Amazon Workers Are Listening In on Amazon Echo Users - The Atlantic
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 16, 2019

April 16, 2019

Behind Every Robot Is a Human Why Amazon workers sometimes listen in on users’ conversations with Alexa, and what it tells us about the technology that powers “smart” devices SIDNEY FUSSELL APR 15, 2019 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/04/amazon-workers-eaves… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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“Ethics” and Ethics
by Giacomo Tesio April 15, 2019

April 15, 2019

https://ia.net/topics/ethics-and-ethics Facebook fishing for our email passwords, Roomba is hovering up all the data on our homes, Amazon is listening to our conversations for laughs, Tik-Tok spying on our kids. And that we see so much dirt on the surface makes it likely that under the surface it’s even worse. The solution for all of this: “Ethics”. Design ethics! Tech ethics! Business ethics! Ethics for AI! [...] The discussion around “ethics” in technology is mostly smoke. The rest is mirrors. There is this expectation of a specialist coming in, the ethicist, the tech ethicist, the AI ethicist, or the design ethicist, that will tell these companies how to be better. The ethicist will solve their ethical dilemmas, logically, with a set of algorithmic rules, and then the corporations will be able to decide which rules their code or “AI” should follow—or not. The idea that ethical specialist can save tech is preposterous. It unveils a complete ignorance of what ethics is, what can and should do. So let’s look at “ethics” and then look at ethics. [...] There is no point discussing “ethics”, if, in the end, all you believe in is cash and power, if everything you are motivated to do is geared towards increasing your user base and your ROI. There is no point other than bullshitting the public. It’s a theatre. [...] It is not an accident that in our time and specifically in the tech industry prefers the word “ethics” over morals so much. [...] Ethics without quotes are the opposite. They’re serious, morally concerned, and they resist technical instrumentalization. Philosophical ethics discusses the morality of human action, it doesn’t provide rules to program self-driving cars. They require to feel and think and understand. As a philosophical discipline, ethics is trying to know what it doesn’t know, it’s aiming at wisdom, not code. [...] We need an informed discussion in parliament, not a clump of aunts and uncles trying to figure out on the fly how the Internet works, or how to make websites, in a time when nobody is talking about “the Internet” or how to make “websites” anymore. We need well-meaning technologists working closely with informed lawmakers, trying to find how to deal with a situation that evolves very quickly. The law needs to protect those who tried to improve the industry from within. Whistleblowers, protestors, those who have the civic courage to disobey. To change the industry from within requires a culture of awareness and resistance inside the companies; we’ve seen clear impact of employee resistance in the last couple of months at Google and Microsoft where employees said no to working on weapon systems, or on search engine for China, or an ethics board with an ethically dubious board. When expensive tech workers take a stand in unity, when systemically relevant employees protest and threaten to shut the machines down, then things move quickly.

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