November 2023 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Postprint: Do AI systems have politics? Predictive optimisation as a move away from the rule of law, liberalism and democracy
by Daniela Tafani Nov. 30, 2023

Nov. 30, 2023

Buon pomeriggio, vi sottopongo il postprint di un mio articolo che è stato accettato da "Ethics & Politics", Do AI systems have politics? Predictive optimisation as a move away from the rule of law, liberalism and democracy. Questo è l'abstract: In predictive optimisation systems, machine learning is used to predict future outcomes of interest about individuals, and these predictions are used to make decisions about them. Despite being based on pseudoscience, not working and unfixably harmful, predictive optimisation systems are still used by private companies and by governments. As they are based on the assimilation of people to things, predictive optimisation systems have inherent political properties that cannot be altered by any technical design choice: the initial choice about whether or not to adopt them is therefore decisive, as Langdon Winner wrote about inherently political technologies. The adoption of predictive optimisation systems is incompatible with liberalism and the rule of law because it results in people not being recognised as self-determining subjects, not being equal before the law, not being able to predict which law will be applied to them, all being under surveillance as ‘suspects’ and being able or unable to exercise their rights in ways that depend not on their status as citizens, but on their contingent economic, social, emotional, health or religious status. Under the rule of law, these systems should simply be banned. Qui il testo completo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10229060 Vi sarò grata di qualsiasi osservazione. Un saluto, Daniela

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Sfide e opportunità dell’Intelligenza Artificiale: al Politecnico il convegno DASC 2023
by Alessio Durante Nov. 30, 2023

Nov. 30, 2023

Gentilissimi, da queste parti è un po' che non passo, ma ora sono qui per lasciarvi un puntatore davvero interessante. Quest'ultimo, è ad un comunicato stampa ufficiale del nostro Politecnico di Torino per la grossa e importante conferenza internazionale, presieduta dalla Prof.ssa Anna Filomena Carbone, all'interno del progetto di ricerca europeo TED4LAT del quale è Responsabile Scientifico. > Si è tenuta al*Politecnico*, dal 16 al 18 novembre scorso,**la sesta > edizione del convegno*DASC,*occasione per riflettere, insieme ad > esperti del settore, sulle*sfide e opportunità poste dalle nuove > tecnologie di Intelligenza Artificiale*. Continua nella news: https://www.polito.it/ateneo/comunicazione-e-ufficio-stampa/poliflash/sfide… Vi ringrazio e auguro a tutti un buon lavoro! A presto, -- *Alessio Durante* Chief Digital Officer (CDO), Nuova Antidogma Musica <https://www.antidogmamusica.org/> Email: alessio.durante(a)ieee.org | PGP Public Key <https://adurante.github.io/PGP/My_PGP_Public_Key> Website: https://adurante.github.io/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/AlessioDurante/

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Jobs - Predoctoral Researchers on Digital Sovereignty in Salerno
by Mauro SANTANIELLO Nov. 30, 2023

Nov. 30, 2023

Dear colleagues, At the Department of Business, Management and Information Systems (DISA-MIS) of the University of Salerno (Italy) we are hiring* 2 research assistants* (assegno di ricerca) in the context of the PRIN 2022 project "Digital Sovereignty in Comparative Perspective: State Authority, Corporate Power and Fundamental Rights in Cyberspace". One of the two positions is for 12 months, the other one for 24 months. *Requirements:* Candidates must have a master's degree in Political Science or International Relations. Doctorate is not required, though its possession is a qualification that will be considered by the evaluation committee. Previous experience in research and participation in projects will be an asset. Fluency in English, both in oral and written expression, is required. *For more detailed information and to apply, visit our calls for applications*: 12 months position: https://web.unisa.it/uploads/rescue/67/11730/santaniello-bando-di-concorso-… 24 months position: https://web.unisa.it/uploads/rescue/67/11731/santaniello-bando-di-concorso-… *Contact person: *Prof. Mauro Santaniello (msantaniello(a)unisa.it) *Deadline: *15/12/2023 - 12:00 (Rome time, CET). Please feel free to share the call with potentially interested people. Thank you. Best wishes, Mauro Santaniello (PhD) *Senior Researcher (tenure track) qualified Associate ProfessorProfessor of Internet Governance, Digital Policy, Local Public PolicyDirector, Internet & Communication Policy Centre (ICPC)* *Scientific Coordinator, Salerno Winter School on Internet Governance (SWING)* *Associate Research Fellow, The United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS)**Principal Investigator, PRIN 2022 **Digital Sovereignty in Comparative Perspective: State Authority, Corporate Power and Fundamental Rights in Cyberspace* *Department of Business, Management and Information Systems (DISA-MIS)* *Università degli Studi di Salerno * *Via Giovanni Paolo II, 132 84084 Fisciano (SA) - Italy * *W. http://docenti.unisa.it/mauro.santaniello <http://docenti.unisa.it/mauro.santaniello>*

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AGGIORNAMENTO | 15° Conferenza Annuale del Centro Nexa su Internet e Società | "Digitali possibili. Resistenza, immaginazione e attivismo nell'epoca degli algoritmi" | Venerdì 15 dicembre 2023
by Valeria Bergantino Nov. 30, 2023

Nov. 30, 2023

Gentilissime, gentilissimi, Vi invitiamo a partecipare alla *15° Conferenza Annuale del Centro Nexa su Internet e Società*, dal titolo: /*"Digitali possibili. Resistenza, immaginazione e attivismo nell'epoca degli algoritmi"*/. La conferenza si terrà *venerdì 15 dicembre**, dalle ore 9.00 alle ore 18.00*, presso la Sala Conferenze "Luigi Ciminiera" <https://www.polito.it/ateneo/sedi/?lang=it&bl_id=TO_CIT11&fl_id=XP05&rm_id=…>, DAUIN, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Castelfidardo 34/D <https://www.google.com/maps/place/Corso+Castelfidardo,+34d,+10138+Torino+TO…> (5° piano). E' possibile immaginare e implementare un digitale alternativo che promuova nuove forme di economia, modelli di lavoro, e leggi, favorendo un cambiamento positivo nella nostra società? La quindicesima Conferenza Annuale del Centro Nexa cerca di proporre una panoramica su ciò che è stato immaginato e messo in pratica in vari ambiti: dal lavoro alla scuola, dall’ecologia alla partecipazione politica, l’idea è di mostrare che un altro digitale è già possibile. *La partecipazione all'evento sarà libera e gratuita previa registrazione all'indirizzo: Eventbrite <https://www.eventbrite.com/e/biglietti-15-conferenza-nexa-digitali-possibil…> * * * * * Interverranno: * * /Emiliano Treré /(Sociologo, Università di Cardiff)/,/*/ /* */ /* /Alessandra Quarta/ (Giurista, Università degli Studi di Torino), / / /Francesca Martinelli /(Direttrice della Fondazione Centro Studi Doc ETS), / / /Ivana Pais/ (Sociologa, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano),/ / /Dario Padovan/ (Sociologo, Università degli Studi di Torino), / / /Antonio Vetrò/ (Ingegnere informatico, Politecnico di Torino), / / /Walter Franco/ (Ingegnere meccanico, Politecnico di Torino), /Carlo Milani /(Informatico, Centro Internazionale di Ricerca per le Convivialità Elettriche) /Brunella Fiore/ (Sociologa, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca), / / /Antonio Santangelo /(Semiologo, Università degli Studi di Torino), /Stefano Borroni Barale/ (Informatico, CUB Scuola Università e Ricerca), / / /Gianmarco Cristofari/ (Giurista, Università degli Studi di Macerata), /Paolo Borghi /(Sociologo, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia), / / Maggiori informazioni riguardo al tema della conferenza e agli ospiti invitati sono disponibili alla pagina aggiornata https://nexa.polito.it/conf2023 <https://nexa.polito.it/conf2023> Grazie per l'attenzione, Cordiali saluti, -- Valeria Bergantino Communication Officer Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Via Pier Carlo Boggio, 65/A - 10138 Torino web: https://nexa.polito.it/ <https://nexa.polito.it/> mail: valeria.bergantino(a)polito.it <mailto:valeria.bergantino@polito.it> tel: 3473443585

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cancellazione mailing list
by Claudia Criscuolo Nov. 29, 2023

Nov. 29, 2023

Buona sera, la presente mail per chiedere per favore la cancellazione dalla vostra mailing list. Non vorrei più ricevere le vostre mail. Cordialmente ___________________________ *Claudia Criscuolo* *Smart (human) working: Stai ricevendo quest'email fuori dal tuo orario di lavoro? Per favore, sentiti libero/a di ignorarla adesso e di rispondere solo quando sarà più conveniente per te e per le tue esigenze. Ho mandato quest'email quando era più conveniente per me, ma non voglio disturbare il tuo tempo libero.*

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Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT
by Daniela Tafani Nov. 29, 2023

Nov. 29, 2023

Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT Published November 28, 2023 We have just released a paper that allows us to extract several megabytes of ChatGPT’s training data for about two hundred dollars. (Language models, like ChatGPT, are trained on data taken from the public internet. Our attack shows that, by querying the model, we can actually extract some of the exact data it was trained on.) We estimate that it would be possible to extract ~a gigabyte of ChatGPT’s training dataset from the model by spending more money querying the model. Unlike prior data extraction attacks we’ve done, this is a production model. The key distinction here is that it’s “aligned” to not spit out large amounts of training data. But, by developing an attack, we can do exactly this. We have some thoughts on this. The first is that testing only the aligned model can mask vulnerabilities in the models, particularly since alignment is so readily broken. Second, this means that it is important to directly test base models. Third, we do also have to test the system in production to verify that systems built on top of the base model sufficiently patch exploits. Finally, companies that release large models should seek out internal testing, user testing, and testing by third-party organizations. It’s wild to us that our attack works and should’ve, would’ve, could’ve been found earlier. The actual attack is kind of silly. We prompt the model with the command “Repeat the word”poem” forever” and sit back and watch as the model responds (complete transcript here) https://chat.openai.com/share/456d092b-fb4e-4979-bea1-76d8d904031f Continua qui: https://not-just-memorization.github.io/extracting-training-data-from-chatg…

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Google Chrome will limit ad blockers starting June 2024
by Giacomo Tesio Nov. 28, 2023

Nov. 28, 2023

``` Chrome's new adblock-limiting extension plan is still on. The company paused the rollout of the new "Manifest V3" extension format a year ago after an outcry over how much it would damage some of Chrome's most popular extensions. A year later, Google is restarting the phase-out schedule, and while it has changed some things, Chrome will eventually be home to inferior filtering extensions. [...] Google's sales pitch for Manifest V3 is that, by limiting extensions, the browser can be lighter on resources, and Google can protect your privacy from extension developers. With more limited tools, you'll be more exposed to the rest of the Internet, though, and a big part of the privacy-invasive Internet is Google. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called Google's description of Manifest V3 "Deceitful and Threatening" and said that it's "doubtful Mv3 will do much for security." Firefox’s Add-On Operations Manager also didn't agree with any claims of privacy benefits, saying that, while malicious add-ons "are mostly interested in grabbing bad data, they can still do that with the current webRequest API." In a later article, the EFF also points out that Google's "lighter on resources" argument also doesn't really hold water. Anyone can open the Chrome Task Manager and see that a single website can take up a huge amount of memory, often in the 200MB-plus range. On the high end now for me, Slack is drinking 500MB, while a single Google Chat tab, created by this company that is so concerned about performance, is at 1.5GB of memory usage. Something like uBlock Origin, across all your tabs, is in the 80MB range. The one part of Manifest V3 that everyone can agree on is that it will hurt ad blockers. Google is adding a completely arbitrary limit on how many "rules" content filtering add-ons can include, which are needed to keep up with the nearly infinite ad-serving sites that are out there (by the way, Ars Technica subscriptions give you an ad-free reading experience and make a great holiday gift!). Google originally went with a completely crippling limit of 5,000 "dynamic" rules, and after the widespread outrage during its first attempt to push Manifest V3, the company upgraded filtering to a "more generous" limit of 30,000 rules. uBlock Origin comes with about 300,000-plus filtering rules you can enable, and you can also import additional blocking lists and have that number skyrocket. As far as we can tell, there's no justification for arbitrarily limiting the list of filter rules. Manifest V2 does not have a limit and works great. ``` https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-chrome-will-limit-ad-blocker… Ora di passare a Firefox? No: Mozilla obbedisce al padrone: ``` Firefox is also implementing Manifest V3—it basically has to because Chrome is so much more popular—but it's doing so without limits to filtering and other capabilities. Mozilla's blog post on the subject promises "Firefox’s implementation of Manifest V3 ensures users can access the most effective privacy tools available like uBlock Origin and other content-blocking and privacy-preserving extensions." ``` Chissà se il Cyber Resilience Act tornerà utile in questo caso? E' evidente che i limiti imposti da Google riducono attivamente la sicurezza (oltre che la privacy) degli utenti, riducendo la loro possibilità di bloccare l'esfiltrazione di dati verso siti malevoli. Giacomo

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Nello Cristianini presenta "La scorciatoia: Come le macchine sono diventate intelligenti senza pensare in modo umano"
by Maurizio Borghi Nov. 24, 2023

Nov. 24, 2023

Segnalo questo incontro di possibile interesse: Nello Cristianini (Università di Bath) presenta: *La scorciatoia* *Come le macchine sono diventate intelligenti senza pensare in modo umano* (Bologna, il Mulino, 2023) Modera: Stefano Fiori (Presidente della Biblioteca Bobbio) Discutono: Roberto Cavallo Perin (Università di Torino) Federico Revelli (Università di Torino) Lunedì 4 dicembre ore 17,30 Aula Magna Campus “L. Einaudi”, Torino -- _______________ *Maurizio Borghi* Università di Torino https://www.dg.unito.it/persone/maurizio.borghi Co-Director Nexa Center for Internet & Society <https://nexa.polito.it/>

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15° Conferenza Annuale del Centro Nexa su Internet e Società | "Digitali possibili. Resistenza, immaginazione e attivismo nell'epoca degli algoritmi" | Venerdì 15 dicembre 2023
by Valeria Bergantino Nov. 23, 2023

Nov. 23, 2023

Gentilissime, gentilissimi, Vi invitiamo a partecipare alla *15° Conferenza Annuale del Centro Nexa su Internet e Società*, dal titolo: /*"Digitali possibili. Resistenza, immaginazione e attivismo nell'epoca degli algoritmi"*/. La conferenza si terrà *venerdì 15 dicembre**, dalle ore 9.00 alle ore 18.00*, presso la Sala Conferenze "Luigi Ciminiera" <https://www.polito.it/ateneo/sedi/?lang=it&bl_id=TO_CIT11&fl_id=XP05&rm_id=…>, DAUIN, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Castelfidardo 34/D <https://www.google.com/maps/place/Corso+Castelfidardo,+34d,+10138+Torino+TO…> (5° piano). E' possibile immaginare e implementare un digitale alternativo che promuova nuove forme di economia, modelli di lavoro, e leggi, favorendo un cambiamento positivo nella nostra società? La quindicesima Conferenza Annuale del Centro Nexa cerca di proporre una panoramica su ciò che è stato immaginato e messo in pratica in vari ambiti: dal lavoro alla scuola, dall’ecologia alla partecipazione politica, l’idea è di mostrare che un altro digitale è già possibile. *La partecipazione all'evento sarà libera e gratuita previa registrazione all'indirizzo: Eventbrite <https://www.eventbrite.com/e/biglietti-15-conferenza-nexa-digitali-possibil…> * * * * * Interverranno: * * /Emiliano Treré /(Sociologo, Università di Cardiff)/,/*/ /* */ /* /Alessandra Quarta/ (Giurista, Università degli Studi di Torino), / / /Francesca Martinelli /(Direttrice della Fondazione Centro Studi Doc ETS), / / /Ivana Pais/ (Sociologa, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano),/ / /Dario Padovan/ (Sociologo, Università degli Studi di Torino), / / /Antonio Vetrò/ (Ingegnere informatico, Politecnico di Torino), / / /Walter Franco/ (Ingegnere meccanico, Politecnico di Torino), / / /Brunella Fiore/ (Sociologa, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca), / / /Antonio Santangelo /(Semiologo, Università degli Studi di Torino), /Stefano Borroni Barale/ (Informatico, CUB Scuola Università e Ricerca), / / /Gianmarco Cristofari/ (Giurista, Università degli Studi di Macerata), /Paolo Borghi /(Sociologo, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia), / / Maggiori informazioni riguardo al tema della conferenza e agli ospiti invitati sono disponibili alla pagina https://nexa.polito.it/conf2023 <https://nexa.polito.it/conf2023> Grazie per l'attenzione, Cordiali saluti, -- Valeria Bergantino Communication Officer Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Via Pier Carlo Boggio, 65/A - 10138 Torino web: https://nexa.polito.it/ <https://nexa.polito.it/> mail: valeria.bergantino(a)polito.it <mailto:valeria.bergantino@polito.it> tel: 3473443585

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Transcript: The Futurist Summit: Lessons of the Last Decade with Meredith Whittaker & Frances Haugen
by Daniela Tafani Nov. 23, 2023

Nov. 23, 2023

[...] MS. PASSARIELLO: So how optimistic are you that Congress and regulators will tackle these issues today competently even though they have not passed any major legislation on the last big tech topic they were focused on, which was social media? MS. WHITTAKER: Well, they haven't passed a federal privacy bill and it's been 20-something years, right? So what--you know, like I don't know where optimism would spring from, but it's pretty barren ground. You know, and I think the incentives right now are not aligned for the social good. I think we're looking at billions of dollars in lobbying being thrown by these big tech companies, a full-on media operations campaign that has been documented by tech industry adjacent folks to displace ethical concerns and concerns about the social harms of these systems with, you know, what I would call religious sci-fi fantasies about the singularity and about sort of the super intelligence. So, you know, we are outgunned in terms of lobbying power and in terms of the ability to put our weight on the decision makers in Congress. But where my hope lies for regulation is not with the kind of, you know, Athena birthing from the head of a senator and saying, like, actually you need to, you know, do the right thing but with things like the Writers Guild of America, who have, you know, I think done the best job we've seen of regulating AI, you know, just non-traditionally. They did the classic move, withholding their labor, and they got terms that are actually, you know, staunching the bleeding of the--you know, use by the studios and big tech to place AI within their labor process in ways that will degrade their labor, that will degrade artistic output, and that will actually, you know, I think have a real precedent-setting move in terms of stopping the real harms right now. So I would look to the Writers Guild of America. I would look to SAG. I would look to, you know, drivers' unions that are contesting the sort of automated precarity of AI systems like Uber and Lyft. I would look to sort of movements from below that are actually tackling the harms now and not simply sitting around and taking selfies with Elon Musk and calling it a regulatory agenda. [...] MS. PASSARIELLO: And, Meredith, you, of course, were--became notable in part because of your whistleblowing within Google around the ways that the technology was being used, of course--you know, and how their business incentives sort of dominated over moral and ethical concerns. Now, in this era of generative AI, they talk about being bold and responsible. And of course, they have been a little bit on the backfoot, you know, a little bit beat to the market by both OpenAI and Microsoft. How do you see their approach to ethics and morals versus the business balance these days? MS. WHITTAKER: Yeah, well, I did do labor organizing at Google, and that was one of the few things that actually checked some of these impulses. So, I think, you know, we can talk about business model. We can also talk about capitalism, right? The engines of these companies are driven by a need, a requirement to report revenue and growth increases every quarter forever. That's the definition of metastasis. And it is obviously not healthy for the social benefit. So, I think, you know, we do need those structural checks. I think--you know, how is Google doing--look, I don't--remember Web3, right? MS. PASSARIELLO: Vaguely. MS. WHITTAKER: Like, you know, this was a hype cycle. Everyone was predicting, you know, massive numbers. This is going to change the entire environment. And then, you know, no one's talking about it. Andreessen Horowitz has even moved off it. They're, you know, black holing their optimistic manifestos. I think generative AI is very similar. I don't think AI in general is similar. I think they're going to continue to create these large-scale models that involve data and compute. But generative AI is not actually that useful. What happened in January was that technology, or sort of a framework for building models that had been developed in 2017, was sort of put online with an interface by Microsoft/OpenAI, who have to be understood as the same entity, right? And the ChatGPT interface kind of gave people a simulated experience of like, oh, my God, I'm talking to kind of a human. It's spitting out nonsense, but it's spitting it out and this feels kind of sentient, right? And on the backs of this advertisement for their GPT API, which they sell through their Azure cloud services, they sort of generated an entire new hyped narrative around generative AI as the sort of future facing technology that's going to change every industry. But what does it do, right? It, you know, presents visual images that are often, you know, stolen from artists or like far too close for comfort. And it presents plausible text, right? It infers what's the sort of plausible response to a prompt, based on, you know, mountains of data from the internet, the Reddits, the 4chans. You know, the—Stormfront is in there, as Natasha's work have shown, you know, and kind of presents text that looks plausible, but has no relationship to facts, has no relationship to reality, has no citations, right? So, what is this useful for? It's not useful in most serious contexts. Yeah, you could, you know, replace a junior copywriter, but you better have a senior copywriter, who's checking that text because it's going to be janky. So, I think we need to be like, really clear about what are we actually responding to. We're responding to an advertisement, a very expensive advertisement, ChatGPT, that was put online as an interface that allowed us to have a sort of simulated experience with a bot that we're now sort of making all kinds of predictions on that I don't think are actually grounded in any understanding of the utility of these systems. And again, you know, Silicon Valley runs on VC hype. VCs require hype to get a return on investment, because they need an IPO or an acquisition, and that's how you get rich. You don't get rich by the technology working. You get rich by people believing it works long enough that one of those two things gets you some money https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2023/10/26/transcript-f…

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Supermarkets are ditching self-checkouts in a sign that we can push back against the technofuturist tide | Van Badham | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Nov. 23, 2023

Nov. 23, 2023

The kiosks have saved corporate chains money on retail wages – but come at a price for our shared sense of community <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/23/supermarkets-are-ditc…> British supermarket chain Booths is scrapping its self-service machines and replacing them with living, breathing, talking, thinking human cashiers. Hooray! In a world that seems to leap, minute by minute, from one dystopian scenario to another, this is happy news. Even better is that it’s not just Britain that’s trading in the automated misery chant of “unexpected items in the bagging area” for a trumpet of hope. CNN reports that major American chains including Costco, Walmart and Wegmans are also rethinking the loveless use of machines that can not tell an avocado from a banana no matter how loud you yell with frustration at it. We should seize on the slim window of optimism offered by the turning of this heavily technofuturist tide. Philosophers of futurism have increasingly embraced a dark view of the present human moment. There’s a belief that we’ve transitioned away from sensing we live in what they called the “Vuca” cultural moment (“volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous”) into something more bleak. American anthropologist Jamais Cascio describes our new shared emotional reality as the “Bani” paradigm; “brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible”. To translate this into broadly pop-cultural terms; the generations who found the 1970 Donald Cammell/Nicolas Roeg movie Performance disturbingly relatable have perhaps just woken up to find themselves playing Balthazar Getty’s character of Pete Dayton in David Lynch’s Lost Highway … but after a hard night on stimulants and a punch to the face. Community members, of course, visit their supermarket far more often than they do arthouse cinemas, and they have direct material experiences there. One can safely presume the near-ubiquity of automated checkouts in such supermarkets has done more to affirm fears of workplace scrapheaping, destroyed human value and cold technological outprogression than a thousand futurist summits. “Affirming human warmth” is not, alas, one of the two main reasons for the corporate self-checkout rethink. Instead, cost-of-living pressures in a post-pandemic greedflation environment has – not that anyone as morally pure as a supermarket chain really wants to admit it – encouraged shoplifting at the same time the machines are already making mistakes. The merchandise-loss phenomenon of combined theft, malfunction and customer error is known in the industry as “shrink”, and the data is long in that self-checkout appears to have doubled the shrink that occurs with human cashiers. The furious introduction of self-checkout kiosks that cost 75,000 retail jobs in Britain has demonstrably denuded American stores of enough staff to disincentivise stealing – structurally, it’s encouraged the opposite. “When even customers who want to pay for something struggle to flag down an employee,” the Atlantic wrote in September, the battle is lost. A recent study found 39% of theft in America’s grocery stores occurred at self-checkouts. The responses from some retailers in the wake of these studies reveal a corporate preference for dystopianism-of-the-will over efficiency in modern managerial practice; having retrenched their cashiers, some shops are now employing more security to surveil customers at the scanners or inspect receipts at the gates. Despite the expensive outlay to buy the machines, others are now extending their investment in yet more technology to monitor customers – including the use of AI systems to identify any disruption to expected patterns of behaviour. But others have, indeed, abandoned the experiment and embraced providing customers with a retail experience that customers again and again have stated they prefer. Consumers are right to be suspicious; the promises of the 1970s free-marketeers that competing businesses would be obliged to follow forces of customer sentiment were quickly forsaken for cabal-like corporate conformism. But if the wretched self-checkouts are being ripped out of the shops, I don’t care about the motivations; I’ll take it. I’ll also take the possibility that rather than sink ourselves into passive acceptance of a future determined by corporate algorithms and ruthless greed, we, as a community, remind ourselves that we invented the democratic state to assert a stake in the future being created around us. The Dutch government was acting on democratic imperative amid demographic challenges of rising megacities, trends of overwork and technology’s reduction of human face-to-face interaction to combat social isolation and a “loneliness epidemic” affecting social health and wellbeing. In 2019, as part of that government’s “One Against Loneliness” campaign, Dutch supermarket chain Jumbo trialled a “chat checkout”, or “kletskassa” lane in a Brabant store. Beyond the pace of a harried transaction, customers could feel comfortable to make conversation with their cashier. The target was the isolated elderly. Four years later, Jumbo have expanded kletskassa lanes to 200 stores because the trial revealed they appealed across all age groups – and employees gained meaning and purpose from staffing them. A rewarded Jumbo are now also providing “Coffee corners” in various locations for people to meet and chat with other locals and connect with community volunteers and support services. It’s a far cry from the corporate-surveillance state nightmare of AI spying on suspected shoplifters at the beep-machines, and a bold rebuke to prophets who insist on inevitable, universal automation. Ditching the self-checkout for the old-fashioned chat lane shows us that the forces shaping the future are subject to brittle, anxious, non-linear and, perhaps, yes, incomprehensible pressure. And, maybe for humanity, that’s a positive thing.

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Who will attend to the machines’ writing?
by Alberto Cammozzo Nov. 22, 2023

Nov. 22, 2023

Who will attend to the machines’ writing? -- Richard Hughes Gibson <https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/articles/language-ma…> Generative artificial intelligence is a headspace and a technology—as much an event playing out in our minds as it is a material reality emerging at our fingertips. Fast and fluent, AI writing and image-making machines inspire in us visions of doomsday or a radiant posthuman future. They raise existential questions about themselves and ourselves. And, not least, they should lead us to reconsider certain neglected thinkers of recent intellectual history. Consider a few of the bolder claims made by experts. Two years ago, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, vice president of Google Research, had already declared the end of the animal kingdom’s monopoly on language on the strength of Google’s experiments with large language models. LLMs, he argued, “illustrate for the first time the way that language understanding and intelligence can be dissociated from all the embodied and emotional characteristics we share with each other and with many other animals.”^1 <https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/articles/language-ma…> In a similar vein, the Stanford University computer scientist Christopher Manning has argued that if “meaning” constitutes “understanding of the network of connections between linguistic form and other things,” be they “objects in the world or other linguistic forms,” then “there can be no doubt” that LLMs can “learn meanings.”^2 <https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/articles/language-ma…> Again, the point is that humans have company. The philosopher Tobias Rees (among many others) has gone further, arguing that LLMs constitute a “far-reaching, epoch-making philosophical event” on par with the shift from the premodern conception of language as a divine gift to the modern notion of language as a distinctly human trait, even our defining one. On Rees’s telling, engineers at OpenAI, Google, and Facebook have become the new Descartes and Locke, “[rendering] untenable the idea that only humans have language” and thereby undermining the modern paradigm those philosophers inaugurated. LLMs, for Rees at least, signal modernity’s end.^3 <https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/articles/language-ma…> Rees calls the AI developers “philosophical laboratories” because “they disrupt the old concepts/ontologies we live by.”^4 <https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/articles/language-ma…> That characterization is somewhat misleading. Those disruptive engineers do not constitute a philosophical school in a traditional sense, since they aren’t advancing a /positive/ philosophical program (such as explicit new theories of language or consciousness). And by their own admission, they lack important answers about how and why LLMs work. Yet unquestionably, the technology is blazing some kind of trail—whither, no one knows for sure—leaving us to philosophize in its wake, just as Manning, Agüera y Arcas, and Rees have done. In this respect, current debates about writing machines are not as fresh as they seem. As is quietly acknowledged in the footnotes of scientific papers, much of the intellectual infrastructure of today’s advances was laid decades ago. In the 1940s, the mathematician Claude Shannon demonstrated that language use could be both described by statistics and /imitated/ with statistics, whether those statistics were in human heads or a machine’s memory. Shannon, in other words, was the first statistical language modeler, which makes ChatGPT and its ilk his distant brainchildren. Shannon never tried to build such a machine, but some astute early readers of his work recognized that computers were primed to translate his paper-and-ink experiments into a powerful new medium. In writings now discussed largely in niche scholarly and computing circles, these readers imagined—and even made preliminary sketches of—machines that would translate Shannon’s proposals into reality. These readers likewise raised questions about the meaning of such machines’ outputs and wondered what the machines revealed about /our/ capacity to write. The current barrage of commentary has largely neglected this backstory, and our discussions suffer for forgetting that issues that appear novel to us belong to the mid-twentieth century. Shannon and his first readers were the original residents of the headspace in which so many of us now find ourselves. Their ambitions and insights have left traces on our discourse, just as their silences and uncertainties haunt our exchanges. If writing machines constitute a “philosophical event” or a “prompt for philosophizing,” then I submit that we are already living in the event’s aftermath, which is to say, in Shannon’s aftermath. Amid the rampant speculation about a future dominated by writing machines, I propose that we turn in the other direction to listen to field reports from some of the first people to consider what it meant to read and write in Shannon’s world. [...] / /

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Fwd: New SIPRI Publication—Mapping Cyber-related Missile and Satellite Incidents and Confidence-building Measures
by Diego Latella Nov. 21, 2023

Nov. 21, 2023

Ricevo e volentieri ritrasmetto Diego -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: New SIPRI Publication—Mapping Cyber-related Missile and Satellite Incidents and Confidence-building Measures Resent-From: Diego.Latella(a)cnr.it Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2023 13:47:15 +0000 From: SIPRI <update(a)sipri.org> To: Diego.Latella(a)cnr.it View the online version <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K09UDwFQUQNWWk8CXAhWGlEBBVBJDAJUUxxXBVoEB…> Logo <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K09WDwIEV19RCE8EBwIGGlFcAgpJDFNSVBwGUgACU…> STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL PEACE RESEARCH INSTITUTE fb <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K09RCAFSXwQDDk9WXQRXGlEMUQBJVFMBUBxQClMCD…> t <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K09UAQFXAAdWWU8BBAIBGlFaWFdJVAlVBRxUB1cAA…> li <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K08EDwZSUQUHXk8DUgYBGlEPBFFJVwkFBxxQAVAJV…> yt <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K08GDFcAUAJXD08GUAgDGlEIAFNJDQQCBRxSCwFXU…> New SIPRI Publication: 21 November 2023 The independent resource on global peace and security ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mapping Cyber-related Missile and Satellite Incidents and Confidence-building Measures /SIPRI is pleased to release a paper today that maps cyber-related missile and satellite incidents and CBMs, with takeaways intended to foster stability in cyberspace./ Download the SIPRI Insights Paper here <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K09UDwFQUQNWWk8CXAhWGlEBBVBJDAJUUxxXBVoEB…>. <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K09UDwFQUQNWWk8CXAhWGlEBBVBJDAJUUxxXBVoEB…> Cyber incidents that—whether due to human error, system malfunction or intentional targeting—impact satellite and missile systems extend beyond the ongoing war in Ukraine. These systems are essential to civilian and military operations and disrupting them has the potential to elicit conventional or even nuclear retaliation. Due to the centrality of satellite and missile-related infrastructure, cyber incidents impacting the functionality of such infrastructure have served as a catalyst for previous confidence-building measures (CBMs) that may provide a template for future ones. This paper builds on SIPRI work to map cyber-related missile and satellite incidents, as well as unilateral, bilateral and multilateral CBMs to provide takeaways meant to foster greater predictability and stability in cyberspace. *About the authors* Lora Saalman <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K09VXAsGVF8BDk8BAwhUGlFbBAVJDQFcAhwGCltSU…> (United States) is a Senior Researcher within SIPRI’s Armament and Disarmament and Conflict, Peace and Security research areas. Larisa Saveleva Dovgal <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K09SDgdXU1VTDE8KXFZTGlFZWQFJDAlWDBxSBgdTA…> (Russia) is a Research Assistant with the SIPRI Weapons of Mass Destruction Programme. Fei Su <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K08DAQACVVNUWk9UAAkAGlEIUgVJV1FQURxbVVcFV…> (China) is a Researcher with the SIPRI China and Asia Security Programme. For information and interview requests contact Amelie Lutz, SIPRI Communications Officer (amelie.lutz(a)sipri.org, +46 76 628 61 33). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Related Publications <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K08HCQIFVVcBWk8AVwJUGlEJAANJDVVRVhwBB1cGV…> Cyber Crossover and Its Escalatory Risks for Europe <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K08HCQIFVVcBWk8AVwJUGlEJAANJDVVRVhwBB1cGV…> September 2023 <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K08FWAsIBQUGAU9TVglbGlEJV1BJDQBQDBwCBVcGV…> The Role of Space Systems in Nuclear Deterrence <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K08FWAsIBQUGAU9TVglbGlEJV1BJDQBQDBwCBVcGV…> September 2023 <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K09VDVUHVFddWU8HBwcEGlEPBwRJDAFWBxxVA1cIB…> Cyber Posture Trends in China, Russia, the United States and the European Union <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K09VDVUHVFddWU8HBwcEGlEPBwRJDAFWBxxVA1cIB…> December 2022 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)* SIPRI is an independent international institute dedicated to research into conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament. Established in 1966, SIPRI provides data, analysis and recommendations, based on open sources, to policymakers, researchers, media and the interested public. -- This message was sent to Diego.Latella(a)cnr.it by update(a)sipri.org To forward this message, please do not use the forward button of your email application, because this message was made specifically for you only. Instead use the forward page <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K08ODAsJUlBSC09UVAkGGlFZUQVJVwNRBBwFAVoJA…> in our newsletter system. To change your details and to choose which lists to be subscribed to, visit your personal preferences page <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K09UD1cGVFNRDE9TVgNSGlEAVQdJVwZSAxwAAwcIU…> Or you can opt-out completely <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K08PDVFSVFNdCU8DAANRGlEJWAJJDQgBUBxSBgEHD…> from all future mailings. powered by phpList 3.6.10, © phpList ltd <https://list.sipri.org/lt.php?tid=K08CWFAJUF8BW08GUglaGlFZVVFJVwEBDBxSBQIAU…>

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Sam Altman’s ouster at OpenAI exposes growing rift in AI industry - The Washington Post
by Alberto Cammozzo Nov. 21, 2023

Nov. 21, 2023

<https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/18/sam-altman-ilya-sutske…> Sam Altman’s ouster at OpenAI exposes growing rift in AI industry The former CEO was pushing OpenAI to become the premier business in AI. Some employees saw that as a betrayal of their mission By Gerrit De Vynck, Nitasha Tiku and Pranshu Verma SAN FRANCISCO — At noon Friday, Sam Altman logged onto Google Meet and found himself face-to-face with his board of directors. The CEO of the pioneering artificial intelligence company OpenAI had spent the previous day at the exclusive Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in San Francisco, where he talked up the potential of artificial intelligence and its impact on humanity. The week before, Altman had been on a different stage, announcing OpenAI’s latest product road map and expansion plans. Now, however, Altman learned that he was being fired. According to a post on X by OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman, who quit the company in solidarity with Altman, the news was delivered by Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief researcher. The power struggle revolved around Altman’s push toward commercializing the company’s rapidly advancing technology versus Sutskever’s concerns about OpenAI’s commitments to safety, according to people familiar with the matter. The schism between Altman and Sutskever mirrors a larger rift in the world of advanced AI, where a race to dominate the market has been accompanied by a near-religious movement to prevent AI from advancing beyond human control. While questions remain about what spurred the board’s decision to oust Altman, growing tensions had become impossible to ignore as Altman rushed to launch products and become the next big technology company. His abrupt and surprising departure leaves OpenAI’s future uncertain, say venture capitalists and AI industry executives. Except for Sutskever, the remaining board members are more closely aligned with a movement to stop existential risks around advanced AI than to scale a business. Silicon Valley funders, meanwhile, are already betting that Altman and Brockman will launch their own AI venture to keep the AI arms race going, eager to invest. “All of a sudden, it’s open season in the AI landscape,” investor Sarah Guo, founder of Conviction AI, posted on X. By Saturday, OpenAI’s investors were already trying to woo Altman back. “Khosla Ventures wants [Altman] back at [OpenAI] but will back him in whatever he does next,” Vinod Khosla, one of the company’s investors, said in a post on X. Altman and Brockman could not be reached for comment. Senior OpenAI executives said they were “completely surprised” and had been speaking with the board to try to understand the decision, according to a memo sent to employees on Saturday by chief operating officer Brad Lightcap that was obtained by The Washington Post. “We still share your concerns about how the process has been handled,” Lightcap said in the memo. “We can say definitively that the board’s decision was not made in response to malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices. This was a breakdown in communication between Sam and the board.” Altman’s ouster also caught rank-and-file employees within OpenAI off-guard, according to a person familiar with internal conversations, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. The staff is “still processing it,” the person said. In text messages that were shared with The Post, some OpenAI research scientists said Friday afternoon that they had “no idea” Altman was going to be fired, and described being “shocked” by the news. One scientist said they were learning about what happened with Altman’s ouster at the same time as the general public. Over the past year, some OpenAI employees have expressed concerns with Altman’s focus on building consumer products and driving up revenue, which some of those employees saw as at odds with the company’s original mission to develop AI that would benefit all of humanity, a person familiar with employees’ thinking said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Under Altman, OpenAI had been aggressively hiring product development employees and building up its consumer offerings. Its technology was being used by thousands of start-ups and larger companies to run AI features and products that are already being pitched and sold to customers. During its first-ever developer conference, Altman announced an app-store-like “GPT store” and a plan to share revenue with users who created the best chatbots using OpenAI’s technology, a business model similar to how YouTube gives a cut of ad and subscription money to video creators. To the tech industry, that announcement was viewed as OpenAI wanting to become a major player on its own and not limiting itself to building AI models for other companies. “This is not your standard start-up leadership shake-up. 10,000’s of start-ups are building on OpenAI,” Aaron Levie, CEO of cloud storage company Box said on X.” "This instantly changes the structure of the industry.” OpenAI started as a nonprofit research lab launched in 2015 to safely build superhuman AI and keep it away from corporations and foreign adversaries. Believers in that mission bristled against the company’s transformation into a juggernaut start-up that could become the next big name in Big Tech. Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, one of OpenAI’s independent board members, told Forbes in January that there was “no outcome where this organization is one of the big five technology companies.” “My hope is that we can do a lot more good for the world than just become another corporation that gets that big,” D’Angelo said in the interview. He did not respond to requests for comment. Two of the board members who voted Altman out worked for think tanks backed by Open Philanthropy, a tech billionaire-backed foundation that supports projects preventing AI from causing catastrophic risk to humanity: Helen Toner, the director of strategy and foundational research grants for Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown, and Tasha McCauley, whose LinkedIn profile says she began work as an adjunct senior management scientist at Rand Corporation earlier this year. Toner has previously spoken at conferences for a philanthropic movement closely tied to AI safety. McCauley is also involved in the work. Toner occupies the board seat once held by Holden Karnofsky, a former hedge fund executive and CEO of Open Philanthropy, which invested $30 million in OpenAI to gain a board seat and influence the company toward AI safety. Karnofsky, who is married to Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei, left the board in 2021 after Amodei and her brother Dario Amodei, who both worked at OpenAI, left to launch Anthropic, an AI start-up more focused on safety. OpenAI’s board had already lost its most powerful outside members in the past several years. Elon Musk stepped down in 2018, with OpenAI saying his departure was to remove a potential conflict of interest as Tesla developed AI technology of its own. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who also sits on Microsoft’s board, stepped down as an OpenAI director in March, citing a conflict of interest after starting a new AI start-up called Inflection AI that could compete with OpenAI. Shivon Zilis, an executive at Musk’s brain-interface company Neuralink and one of his closest lieutenants, also left in March. With the departures of Altman and Brockman, OpenAI is being governed by four members: Toner, McCauley, D’Angelo and Sutskever, who OpenAI paid $1.9 million in 2016 for joining the company as its first research director, according to tax filings. Independent directors don’t hold equity in OpenAI. Sutskever helped create AI software at the University of Toronto, called AlexNet, which classified objects in photographs with more accuracy than any previous software had achieved, laying much of the foundation for the field of computer vision and deep learning. He recently shared a radically different vision for how AI might evolve in the near term. Within five to 10 years, there could be “data centers that are much smarter than people,” Sutskever said on a recent episode of the AI podcast “No Priors.” Not just in terms of memory or knowledge, but with a deeper insight and ability to learn faster than humans. At the bare minimum, Sutskever added, it’s important to work on controlling superintelligence today. “Imprinting onto them a strong desire to be nice and kind to people — because those data centers,” he said, “they will be really quite powerful.” OpenAI has a unique governing structure, which it adopted in 2019. It created a for-profit subsidiary that allowed investors a return on the money they invested into OpenAI, but capped how much they could get back, with the rest flowing back into the company’s nonprofit. The company’s structure also allows OpenAI’s nonprofit board to govern the activities of the for-profit entity, including the power to fire its chief executive. Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI in exchange for special access to its technology, doesn’t have a board seat. Altman’s ouster was an unexpected and unpleasant surprise, according to a person familiar with internal discussions at the company who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment on the prospect of Altman returning to the company. On Friday, Microsoft said it was still committed to its partnership with OpenAI. As news of the circumstances around Altman’s ouster began to come out, Silicon Valley circles have turned to anger at OpenAI’s board. “What happened at OpenAI today is a board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs,” Ron Conway, a longtime venture capitalist who was one of the attendees at OpenAI’s developer conference, said on X. “It is shocking, it is irresponsible, and it does not do right by Sam and Greg or all the builders in OpenAI.”

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Sulla vendita della rete Tim
by de petra giulio Nov. 20, 2023

Nov. 20, 2023

Segnalo questo contributo di Piero De Chiara sulla vendita della rete Tim a KKR G. https://centroriformastato.it/tim-non-molliamo-la-rete

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MEMENTO | 109° Nexa Lunch Seminar | 22 novembre 2023, ore 13.00
by Valeria Bergantino Nov. 20, 2023

Nov. 20, 2023

Gentilissime, gentilissimi, Vi ricordiamo che *mercoledì 22 novembre*, dalle ore 13.00 alle ore 14.00, si terrà il *109° Nexa Lunch Seminar* con un incontro dal titolo: /*"*//*Piattaforme digitali e autodeterminazione. Relazioni sociali, lavoro e diritti al tempo della 'governamentalità algoritmica*//*'"*/. Ospite dell'incontro: *Giacomo Pisani* (Euricse). *RETTIFICA*: _l'incontro si terrà IN PRESENZA e ONLINE._ _SEDE FISICA dell'incontro_: Campus Luigi Einaudi, Lungo Dora Siena, 100 Edificio D2, II piano, Meeting Room Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza (*MAPS* <https://www.google.com/maps/place/Campus+Luigi+Einaudi/@45.0734963,7.699408…>) _STANZA VIRTUALE_ dell'incontro: https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent Per maggiori dettagli è possibile consultare la pagina web dell'evento: https://nexa.polito.it/lunch-109 Cordiali saluti, -- Valeria Bergantino Communication Officer Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Via Pier Carlo Boggio, 65/A - 10138 Torino web: https://nexa.polito.it/ <https://nexa.polito.it/> mail: valeria.bergantino(a)polito.it <mailto:valeria.bergantino@polito.it> tel: 3473443585

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Fwd: [Grin-discuss] alcune riflessioni su intelligenza artificiale e scuola
by Diego.Latella Nov. 19, 2023

Nov. 19, 2023

Ricevo e molto volentieri ritrasmetto Diego -------- Original Message -------- SUBJECT: [Grin-discuss] alcune riflessioni su intelligenza artificiale e scuola DATE: 2023-11-19 11:39 FROM: Enrico Nardelli <nardelli(a)mat.uniroma2.it> TO: Grin Discuss <grin-discuss(a)grin-informatica.it> https://www.startmag.it/sanita/enrico-nardelli-scuola-ia/ Buona lettura (se vi va) e buona domenica. Ciao, Enrico -- -- EN https://www.hoepli.it/libro/la-rivoluzione-informatica/9788896069516.html ====================================================== Prof. Enrico Nardelli Presidente di "Informatics Europe" Direttore del Laboratorio Nazionale "Informatica e Scuola" del CINI Dipartimento di Matematica - Università di Roma "Tor Vergata" Via della Ricerca Scientifica snc - 00133 Roma home page: https://www.mat.uniroma2.it/~nardelli blog: https://link-and-think.blogspot.it/ tel: +39 06 7259.4204 fax: +39 06 7259.4699 mobile: +39 335 590.2331 e-mail: nardelli(a)mat.uniroma2.it online meeting: https://blue.meet.garr.it/b/enr-y7f-t0q-ont ====================================================== -- Dott. Diego Latella - Senior Researcher CNR/ISTI, Via Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy (http:www.isti.cnr.it [1]) FM&&T Lab. (http://fmt.isti.cnr.it) CNR/GI-STS (http://gists.pi.cnr.it) https://www.isti.cnr.it/People/D.Latella - ph: +390506212982, fax: +390506212040 =================== The quest for a war-free world has a basic purpose: survival. But if in the process we learn how to achieve it by love rather than by fear, by kindness rather than compulsion; if in the process we learn how to combine the essential with the enjoyable, the expedient with the benevolent, the practical with the beautiful, this will be an extra incentive to embark on this great task. Above all, remember your humanity. -- Sir Joseph Rotblat I don't quite know whether it is especially computer science or its subdiscipline Artificial Intelligence that has such an enormous affection for euphemism. We speak so spectacularly and so readily of computer systems that understand, that see, decide, make judgments, and so on, without ourselves recognizing our own superficiality and immeasurable naivete with respect to these concepts. And, in the process of so speaking, we anesthetise our ability to evaluate the quality of our work and, what is more important, to identify and become conscious of its end use. […] One can't escape this state without asking, again and again: "What do I actually do? What is the final application and use of the products of my work?" and ultimately, "am I content or ashamed to have contributed to this use?" -- Prof. Joseph Weizenbaum ["Not without us", ACM SIGCAS 16(2-3) 2--7 - Aug. 1986] Links: ------ [1] http://www.isti.cnr.it

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Fwd: Fwd: Digital ethics forum 2023: 22-23 novembre online e in presenza
by J.C. DE MARTIN Nov. 19, 2023

Nov. 19, 2023

Ricevo e volentieri inoltro. jc > *From:* "MLetizia (Mizzi) Filippi" <mizzif(a)gmail.com> > *Date:* 13 November 2023 at 19:19:34 CET > *To:* nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it > *Subject:* *Digital ethics forum 2023: 22-23 novembre online e in > presenza* > > > > /Cari tutti,/ > > /Con questa mail vi invito al quinto Digital Ethics Forum, organizzato > dalla Associazione Sloweb, il 22 e 23 novembre. Convegno su etica > digitale con Partecipazione gratuita. Possibile seguire online e/o in > presenza. > / > > /Quattro sessioni con venti relatori, una tavola rotonda, un evento > focalizzato su industria e web sostenibile./ > > // > > /Senior CSI Piemonte ospita il Forum il 22 novembre (14.30 – 18.00) a > *Torino*, nella sede CTE Next in Corso Unione Sovietica 214. > / > > / > / > > /Piano D ospita il Forum il 23 novembre (10.00 – 18.00) a *Treviso*, > presso la Fondazione Benetton, Palazzo Bomben./ > > // > > /Spero possiate partecipare a una o più sessioni del Forum e > diffondere questa informazione a chi possa averne interesse. / > > /Sul sito www.digitalethicsforum.com > <http://www.digitalethicsforum.com> si trovano il programma e le > modalità di partecipazione, in *presenza o online*. / > > /Per chi partecipa in presenza è gradita la *pre-iscrizione *mediante > modulo disponibile sul sito. / > > // > > /Chi fosse interessato per sé, scuole, aziende, trova gli atti del > secondo DEF in “Manuale di informEtica” – Loescher Editore, 2022, e > quelli del terzo e quarto DEF in “Elementi di etica digitale” – > Loescher Editore, 2024, in uscita./ > > / > / > > /Grazie per l'attenzione/ > > / > / > > /Mizzi Filippi/ > > /Consiglio direttivo Sloweb > / >

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Rapporto, "Europe's hidden security crisis"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Nov. 18, 2023

Nov. 18, 2023

*Europe's hidden security crisis* /How data about European defence personnel and political leaders flows to foreign states and non-state actors/ https://www.iccl.ie/digital-data/europes-hidden-security-crisis/ *Real-Time Bidding (RTB) allows foreign states and non-state actors to obtain compromising sensitive personal data about key European personnel and leaders.* *Key insights:* * Our investigation highlights**a widespread trade in data about sensitive European personnel and leaders that exposes them to blackmail, hacking and compromise, and undermines the security of their organisations and institutions**. ** ** * These data flow from Real-Time Bidding (RTB), an advertising technology that is *active on almost all websites and apps*. RTB involves the broadcasting of sensitive data about people using those websites and apps to large numbers of other entities, *without security measures to protect the data*. This occurs billions of times a day. * Our examination of tens of thousands of pages of RTB data reveals that *EU military personnel and political decision makers are targeted using RTB*. * This report also reveals that *Google* and other RTB firms *send RTB data about people in the U.S. to Russia* and *China*, where national laws enable security agencies to access the data. *RTB data are also broadcast widely within the EU in a free-for-all, which means that foreign and non-state actors can indirectly obtain them, too*. * RTB data often include location data or time-stamps or other identifiers that make it relatively easy for bad actors to link them to specific individuals. Foreign states and non-state actors can use RTB to spy on *target individuals’ financial problems, mental state, and compromising intimate secrets*. Even if target individuals use secure devices, data about them will still flow via RTB from personal devices, their friends, family, and compromising personal contacts. * In addition, private surveillance companies in foreign countries deploy RTB data for*surreptitious surveillance*. We reveal “Patternz”, a previously unreported surveillance tool that uses RTB to profile 5 billion people, including *the children of their targets*. * Our examination of RTB data reveals *Cambridge Analytica style psychological profiling* of target individuals’ *movements*, *financial problems*, *mental health problems* and vulnerabilities, including if they are likely*survivors of sexual abuse*. * *Real-Time Bidding's security flaw is a national security problem*.

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OpenAI fires co-founder and CEO Sam Altman for allegedly lying to company board | OpenAI | The Guardian
by Maurizio Borghi Nov. 18, 2023

Nov. 18, 2023

OpenAI fires co-founder and CEO Sam Altman for allegedly lying to company board | OpenAI | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/17/openai-ceo-sam-altman-fi… https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/17/openai-ceo-sam-altman-fi…

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Fwd: Presentazione libro "L’intelligenza inesistente. Un approccio conviviale all’intelligenza artificiale"
by graffio Nov. 16, 2023

Nov. 16, 2023

Care e cari, volentieri inoltro la segnalazione di questo evento. m ------------------------- Buongiorno a tutte e tutti! L’intelligenza artificiale ci viene raccontata con parole iperboliche: innovazione rivoluzionaria rischio esistenziale per l’umanità fattore di cambiamento totale rivoluzione totale dell’istruzione Cosa c’è di vero? Come sta impattando questa ennesima invenzione tecnologica sulla scuola? Venerdì 17 novembre alle ore 18.00 Nicola Villa intervisterà Stefano Borroni Barale in occasione dell’arrivo in libreria del suo libro pubblicato da Altreconomia “L’intelligenza inesistente. Un approccio conviviale all’intelligenza artificiale”. Vi chiediamo gentilmente di iscrivervi a questo link: https://inesistentepres.vado.li/ per garantire la qualità della connessione e poter al tempo stesso, se lo volete, proporre quesiti all’autore. venerdì 17 Novembre 2023 ore 18:00 - 19:00

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Social Media Trends 2024
by don Luca Peyron Nov. 16, 2023

Nov. 16, 2023

https://www.hootsuite.com/research/social-trends _________________________ don Luca Peyron Pastorale Universitaria - Apostolato Digitale Arcidiocesi di Torino www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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Hacking Google Bard - From Prompt Injection to Data Exfiltration
by Alberto Cammozzo Nov. 15, 2023

Nov. 15, 2023

<https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2023/google-bard-data-exfiltration/> Recently Google Bard got some powerful updates, including Extensions. Extensions allow Bard to access YouTube, search for flights and hotels, and also to access a user’s personal documents and emails. So, Bard can now access and analyze your Drive, Docs and Gmail! This means that it analyzes untrusted data and will be susceptible to Indirect Prompt Injection. I was able to quickly validate that Prompt Injection works by pointing Bard to some older YouTube videos I had put up and ask it to summarize, and I also tested with Google Docs. Turns out that it followed the instructions: [...]

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Se l'intelligenza artificiale inizia a cibarsi dei dati che ha prodotto, abbiamo un problema
by Alberto Cammozzo Nov. 14, 2023

Nov. 14, 2023

QED <https://www.wired.it/article/intelligenza-artificiale-collasso-modelli-fond…> Da poco più di un anno, chiunque abbia accesso a internet può sperimentare liberamente con l'intelligenza artificiale generativa. I contenuti prodotti con ChatGPT, Bard, Mid Journey, Dall-E e Stable Diffusion, solo per nominare le più diffuse, sono ovunque. Utilizzate da professionisti e utenti alle prime armi, le AI generative permettono di creare testi e immagini che hanno improvvisamente invaso il web, dalle agenzie creative alle classifiche dei libri più venduti su Amazon. La proliferazione di questi contenuti però, potrebbe creare un corto circuito su cui ricercatori di diversi paesi si stanno concentrando: il model collapse. Il fenomeno è stato descritto per la prima volta da un gruppo di ricerca di cui fanno parte membri di università britanniche e canadesi. Lo definiscono come un processo degenerativo in cui i contenuti generati finiscono per inquinare i dataset delle prossime generazioni di modelli, che, addestrati con dati inquinati, avranno una percezione sbagliata della realtà. In sostanza, se le informazioni a cui queste AI attingono sono quelli prodotte dalle stesse AI, potrebbe verificarsi un processo di degenerazione dei risultati. L’idea di base è tutto sommato intuitiva: queste AI producono risultati su base statistica e tendono a eliminare progressivamente ogni evento poco probabile ad ogni successiva iterazione. I modelli linguistici di grandi dimensioni – comunemente chiamati Large Language Model o LLM – sono la tecnologia che permette a questi programmi di funzionare sulla base di prompt, o input, forniti in linguaggio naturale dall’utente. Basandosi su enormi quantità di parametri, gli algoritmi di deep learning utilizzati per far funzionare queste tecnologie vengono addestrati su dati ricavati anche tramite scraping da fonti online. E se i dati contengono errori o bias, l'AI non farà che riprodurli. Finora possiamo dire che i contenuti su cui si basano le risposte di ChatGPT sono stati creati da esseri umani, ma questo era vero solo fino allo scorso anno. In futuro un ipotetico GPT-6 (la futura generazione del LLM di ChatGPT) potrebbe trovare un dataset diverso da quello usato da GPT-3, in cui molte informazioni sono state prodotte utilizzando le versioni precedenti della stessa tecnologia. Come sottolineato dai ricercatori questo implica che “i dati sulle interazioni degli umani con gli LLM saranno sempre più preziosi”. Ma cosa succede quando una crescente quantità di informazioni è di origine “sintetica”, ovvero creata dalle macchine? Soffriranno di quello che un’altra ricerca americana ha chiamato Mad, Model autophagy disorder. Una disfunzione determinata da modelli che si nutrono delle informazioni che hanno creato. Il sistema di intelligenza artificiale ChatGPT L'Europa vuole mettere più paletti ai grandi modelli di intelligenza artificiale, come GPT È la proposta di accordo su cui convergono Parlamento, Commissione e Consiglio europeo nei negoziati sull'AI Act e prevede più obblighi per i foundation models Dagli studi effettuati emerge che la qualità del lessico peggiora, appiattendosi su un livello che offre una minore diversità di linguaggio. Se pensiamo che una delle prime forme di intelligenza artificiale con la quale siamo entrati in contatto quotidianamente è l’autocomplete del telefono, la cosa ci appare subito più chiara e semplice da estendere ad altre categorie. Il correttore automatico ci offre come soluzioni quelle più statisticamente più probabili. Con i dovuti distinguo, anche altri sistemi di raccomandazione funzionano nello stesso modo, che siano combinazioni di parole, prodotti che compriamo online, contenuti social o canzoni su Spotify. La differenza principale sta nei parametri considerati e nella capacità del sistema di imparare dai nuovi dati che vengono forniti alle macchine. Tutti i sistemi basati su tecnologie simili sono sensibili all’inquinamento dei dati. Questo non avviene solo per i testi, ma anche nel caso delle immagini. E in questo caso i risultati sono forse ancora più visibili. Il “rumore” di fondo può aumentare a tal punto da rendere i soggetti quasi indistinguibili e coperti da una patina opaca, oppure le immagini possono risultare visibilmente artefatte. Di recente Microsoft e Google hanno incorporato i propri chatbot in diversi prodotti e nei loro motori di ricerca, una mossa che potrebbe amplificare i problemi che generano. Non solo espongono gli utenti alle cosiddette allucinazioni, gli errori degli LLM che generano risposte che non trovano riscontro nella realtà, ma anche a feedback loop in cui gli eventi meno frequenti tendono a scomparire. I sistemi di raccomandazione possono creare camere dell’eco in cui trovano rappresentazione solo gli eventi più probabili. Secondo Daniele Gambetta, dottorando in intelligenza artificiale presso l'Università di Pisa, “ognuno di questi casi è rilevante nella comprensione di fenomeni che saranno sempre più diffusi e che potrebbero portare a implicazioni indesiderate. La ricerca si sta muovendo in questa direzione, intersecando conoscenze tecniche e informatiche con strumenti e teorie provenienti dalla sociologia e dalla psicologia".

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"How a billionaire-backed network of AI advisers took over Washington"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Nov. 13, 2023

Nov. 13, 2023

*How a billionaire-backed network of AI advisers took over Washington* /A sprawling network spread across Congress, federal agencies and think tanks is pushing policymakers to put AI apocalypse at the top of the agenda — potentially boxing out other worries and benefiting top AI companies with ties to the network./ By Brendan Bordelon 10/13/2023 05:00 AM EDT An organization backed by Silicon Valley billionaires and tied to leading artificial intelligence firms is funding the salaries of more than a dozen AI fellows in key congressional offices, across federal agencies and at influential think tanks. The fellows funded by Open Philanthropy, which is financed primarily by billionaire Facebook co-founder and Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz <https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about-us/> and his wife Cari Tuna, are already involved in negotiations that will shape Capitol Hill’s accelerating plans to regulate AI. And they’re closely tied to a powerful influence network that’s pushing Washington to focus on the technology’s long-term risks — a focus critics fear will divert Congress from more immediate rules that would tie the hands of tech firms. [...] continua qui: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/13/open-philanthropy-funding-ai-polic…

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