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

MEMENTO | 109° Nexa Lunch Seminar | 22 novembre 2023, ore 13.00

by Valeria Bergantino

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

Nov. 20, 2023

Fwd: [Grin-discuss] alcune riflessioni su intelligenza artificiale e scuola

by Diego.Latella

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

Nov. 19, 2023

Sulla vendita della rete Tim

by de petra giulio

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

Nov. 19, 2023

Fwd: Fwd: Digital ethics forum 2023: 22-23 novembre online e in presenza

by J.C. DE MARTIN

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 > / >

Nov. 19, 2023

Sam Altman’s ouster at OpenAI exposes growing rift in AI industry - The Washington Post

by Alberto Cammozzo

<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.”

Nov. 19, 2023

Rapporto, "Europe's hidden security crisis"

by J.C. DE MARTIN

*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*.

Nov. 18, 2023

OpenAI fires co-founder and CEO Sam Altman for allegedly lying to company board | OpenAI | The Guardian

by Maurizio Borghi

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…

Nov. 18, 2023

Who will attend to the machines’ writing?

by Alberto Cammozzo

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. [...] / /

Nov. 17, 2023

Fwd: Presentazione libro "L’intelligenza inesistente. Un approccio conviviale all’intelligenza artificiale"

by graffio

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

Nov. 16, 2023

Social Media Trends 2024

by don Luca Peyron

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

Nov. 16, 2023