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[Responsible AI] When Abstraction Fails: Navigating Uncertainty in High-Stakes Systems
by Daniele Quercia May 12, 2025

May 12, 2025

Title: When Abstraction Fails: Navigating Uncertainty in High-Stakes Systems Join the meeting<https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_YzczNmM0YWUtNWU4ZC00…> Abstract: With high-stakes systems, safety and security engineering depends heavily on abstractions — models, simulations, bench tests — that stand in for the system itself. But these abstractions have limits. They inevitably rely on imperfect assumptions: simplifications that hold until they don’t, especially under conditions of novelty, extremity, or scale. In systems that push the boundaries of performance, therefore, abstraction becomes brittle, and the pretense of total foresight becomes a liability. This talk examines what happens when engineers reach the limits of their abstractions. Focusing on testing and modeling under conditions of extremity, I explore how ‘rational’ accidents can arise from the limits of what can be known, tested, or anticipated in advance. From there I examine how one domain — civil aviation — manages these accidents by leveraging decades of accumulated operational experience. The talk is an invitation to reconsider what counts as credible knowledge in high-consequence engineering, and to value operational experience not as a fallback when models fail, but as a foundation for safety and security when they inevitably do. <https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02191>Bio: John Downer is Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Bristol. He has written extensively about the idiosyncrasies of technoscientific knowledge, the limits of proof, and their implications for technology governance. His 2024 monograph ‘Rational Accidents: Reckoning with Catastrophic Technologies,’ examines the logical dilemmas of establishing ‘ultra-high’ reliabilities in highly complex systems such as jetliners and reactors, and unpacks the practical ramifications of those dilemmas. His broader work looks at epistemological and regulatory issues in a range of technological domains, from civil aviation and nuclear, to autonomous systems and artificial intelligence. He has a PhD in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Cornell University, and prior to joining Bristol he held positions at Kings College London, the London School of Economics (LSE), and Stanford University. He is currently a visiting researcher at the Centre for the Governance of Artificial Intelligence (GovAI) in Oxford.

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I 23 “no” per riprendersi Internet
by Andrea Trentini May 8, 2025

May 8, 2025

Ho appena ascoltato questo podcast di Attivissimo: https://attivissimo.me/2025/05/07/podcast-rsi-perche-devo-dare-una-password… (a questo link anche il testo trascritto, per chi non ama gli audio) è carino, non sapevo della lista dei 23 "no", invero se ne potrebbero aggiungere un bel po' :) -- Andrea Trentini ⠠⠵ - http://atrent.it - public key ID: 0xA7A91E3B - Dip.to di Informatica - Università degli Studi di Milano Cittadinanza Digitale e Tecnocivismo - https://www.ledizioni.it/prodotto/cittadinanza-digitale-tecnocivismo - https://edizionithemis.it/catalogo/digitale-e-societa/dal-tecnocivismo-alla… Sistemi Embedded - https://www.ledizioni.it/prodotto/a-carraturo-a-trentini-sistemi-embedded-t…

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Dopamina: Quando un'app diventa droga
by Giacomo Tesio May 8, 2025

May 8, 2025

Ciao a tutti, volevo segnalarvi questa breve serie di corti divulgativi sui social (credo a produzione francese): https://www.arte.tv/it/videos/RC-017841/dopamina/ Ne ho visti un paio e li ho trovati chiari e divertenti (sebbene, come spesso accade, superficiali dal punto di vista tecnico [1]) Non mi pare fossero già passati in lista, ma credo che possano aiutare molti a comprendere un po' meglio le caratteristiche progettuali di questi software e le intenzioni di chi li realizza e distribuisce. Giacomo [1] ad esempio, quando vengono elencati i dati condivisi dalle varie app, l'elenco non tiene conto delle correlazioni fra coordinate satellitari (e dunque luoghi), orari etc.. di tutte le altre persone ivi presenti nello stesso posto etc...

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AI Is Reshaping American Cities - But Not Equally
by Daniele Quercia May 8, 2025

May 8, 2025

May be of interest… AI Is Reshaping American Cities - But Not Equally Daniele Quercia [cid:image001.png@01DBBFF9.91B8F060] Darker colours represent higher AI impact within MSAs. Grey areas indicate regions outside the boundaries of MSAs, which generally have lower population densities and are not included in the analysis due to limited data availability. Artificial intelligence promises to transform how we work, automating tasks, boosting productivity, and opening up new economic frontiers. But beneath the optimism lies a stark reality: AI's impact is far from evenly spread. In a new study<https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-0…> published in Springer EPJ Data Science, we examined how AI is likely to affect labour markets across U.S. metropolitan areas. The results reveal a troubling pattern: one that risks deepening America’s existing economic divides. By analysing 24,758 AI-related patents filed between 2015 and 2022 and linking them to 17,879 occupational tasks, we developed a fine-grained map of where AI is likely to hit hardest. The findings defy the assumption that only major tech hubs are vulnerable. In fact, many of the most at-risk places are mid-sized cities whose economies hinge on a single sector. Dalton, Georgia, for example, is tightly bound to carpet manufacturing. Columbus, Indiana depends on the automotive industry. Rochester, Minnesota, renowned for its healthcare sector, also faces elevated risk. In each case, a heavy reliance on routine-intensive industries leaves these places exposed to automation, with few alternative sectors to soften the blow. In contrast, some of the least-impacted cities in our analysis such as Daphne-Fairhope-Foley in Alabama, Coeur d’Alene in Idaho, and Grants Pass in Oregon share a different trait: economic diversity. These cities spread employment across a broader range of industries, making them better equipped to absorb shocks and adjust as AI transforms specific sectors. We also found that the East Coast, on average, is more exposed to AI disruption than the West. Though highly innovative hubs like the Bay Area and Seattle remain high-impact outliers. Cities experiencing rapid growth in “creative class” jobs such as engineers, scientists, designers are also more likely to face disruption. Knowledge work, it turns out, is not immune to automation; in some cases, it is on the front lines. AI is not just a story of technological progress. It is a story of geography, resilience, and inequality. Left unchecked, it could entrench existing divides, fuelling growth in already-advantaged regions while sidelining those with fewer resources to adapt. The policy response must match the scale of the challenge: support for economic diversification, investment in re-skilling, and a renewed focus on regions at risk of being left behind. To help individuals and policymakers better understand what AI might mean for them, we’ve also made our data public. On our interactive platform<http://social-dynamics.net/aii>, users can explore how AI is projected to affect different occupations, and even drill down to specific tasks within those jobs to see which are most susceptible to automation. The AI revolution is underway. With the right tools and the right foresight, we can ensure it lifts more communities than it leaves behind.

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European Data Sovereignty, iniziative italiane?
by Marco Fioretti May 8, 2025

May 8, 2025

Buongiorno a tutti, devo scrivere (entro domani sera...) un breve commento, molto generale, su questo tema. Qualsiasi segnalazione di iniziative e proposte italiane in proposito, nonche' ad esempio di posizioni e commenti dei politici, e' benvenuta. Idem per vostre opinioni sul tema. NON so se riusciro' a usare quanto ricevero' stavolta, ma potrei proporlo come seguito del primo post. Grazie in anticipo, Marco

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AI and Internet Hygiene
by Daniela Tafani May 7, 2025

May 7, 2025

Non mi pare sia stato segnalato a suo tempo AI and Internet Hygiene we are going to have to re-learn how to use the computer Kate Wagner Oct 01, 2024 I’m from a very specific generation, the first one in which learning how to use the open Internet was a skill taught in childhood. There’s not much that’s good about being from this generation (I will never own a house, be out of student loan debt, and the idea of having children takes on an air of fantasy) but at least I learned how to be proficient at the computer. This proficiency was out of necessity. You see, back in the days before total market saturation, the big tech companies had an incentive to educate. They couldn’t sell a technology people were so intimidated by. Classes were taught in schools, libraries, and community centers, and a cottage industry of computer instruction sprung up everywhere. A wealth of educational materials flooded the market targeted towards new computer and Internet users, which, in the early 1990s, was pretty much anyone not working in a previously computerized industry. Some of these were even for children: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzQLI7BxfYI> The Internet of the 1990s and 2000s and the Internet of the present couldn’t be more different. Both the early and middle Internet shared a commonality of being mostly decentralized and much less closed-source than it presently is under platformization. While so many of us are nostalgic for this now, in an era when five corporations own the entire web, at the time it was a double-edged sword. In some ways, the basic HTML and blinking GIFs Internet of the past was utopian in scope — millions of people learning how to express themselves and communicate with one another in real time, each around a certain skill level. But in other ways, it was an experimental void in which a mix of anonymity and technological prowess could be used not to contribute knowledge or become better-connected but to exploit those just figuring out how to use this brand new technology. Later, when the Internet reached more people, when it evolved into more expansive communities, blogs, content aggregators and early social media sites such as YouTube or MySpace, and when storage space became more conducive to hosting big files, threats and dangers adapted to this new environment in ever-more savvy ways. In other words, the old Internet was not exactly safe. This was especially true during the Windows XP era when that operating system achieved an unprecedented and long-lasting market share, making it a common target. Pop-up ads, scams, drive-by downloads, and wretched computer viruses were extremely common. If you ended up somewhere you weren’t supposed to, the consequences could be dire: your computer would be crippled, hijacked and made slow; sometimes you could even lose everything, all from clicking a link you weren’t supposed to. People my age (30) remember this well. It was a rite of passage in those days to give your family computer a particularly terrible virus (such as one of those fake anti-virus programs that is actually malware) while trying to download custom content for The Sims 2. Hence, because of this fraught webscape, by the age of ten, I knew how to clean up after these kinds of messes — going into the registry, system restoring, booting the computer into Safe Mode so as to run an anti-virus or uninstall a harmful program — all of which required understanding on a basic, structural level, how the computer worked. But more importantly, I learned how to avoid getting into all that trouble in the first place by being able to spot suspicious search engine results, inspect links, and generally discern through visual cues and precedence what parts of online seemed legitimate versus illegitimate. I practiced what is sometimes called Internet hygiene. While computer viruses never stopped being a threat (everyone should still employ the services of an antivirus software) the nature of that threat has changed. Organized hackers are less interested in giving your PC a fake antivirus and more interested in targeting large scale legacy systems such as those used in governments, hospitals, and corporations. Rather than THEMATRIX_(1999).mov.exe, social engineering, ransomware, click fraud, cryptojacking, and data leaks are the orders of the day. Meanwhile, the platformized, app-driven Internet, through moderation and centralization, have made websites into closed systems more impervious to old-school threats such as pop-up ads or drive-by downloads. New Internet-based licensing protocols (increasingly based on monthly subscriptions instead of one-time software licenses) such as Adobe Creative Cloud and Steam, and streaming media services such as Spotify and YouTube that provide swaths of content for little to no cost have not only decimated physical media (and price gouged creators and users alike) — they’ve also chipped away at piracy and the once-overwhelmingly common practice of peer-to-peer sharing, another virus hotbed. Ad-blockers, while a wicked problem for the old-web economy of click-based revenues, also do their part in keeping users safe. I can remember very clearly when I stopped being able to use the computer. It was around 2012, when I switched to MacOS, which (I feel) is a much less transparent operating system than Windows, one that held less of a market share and was thus less commonly targeted by widespread Internet booby traps. (This is not to say Macs don’t get viruses — they absolutely do.) Meanwhile, Internet consumption shifted to smartphones, and the app-based ecosystem only reinforced the closedness and opaqueness of platforms as other websites gradually disappeared. I myself have no idea how a smartphone works, nor the full extent to which my data is being tracked. In fact, we are so inured to sharing data that the very concept of Internet (and personal) privacy itself is eroding more and more. As a result of these massive transformations, computer and Internet usage have been remarkably deskilled among ordinary users. The knowledge of how the Internet or an operating system works, things that used to be necessary simply for using both, has become obfuscated and, as a result, relegated to those in the privatized technology sector. Now, however, the Internet is changing massively yet again. The premature unleashing of AI and large language models (LLMs) in particular onto the open Internet is already having dire consequences for what were, for years, considered stabilized, centralized (if flawed) systems, such as the search engine. AI, thanks to the scope of its spread, its rogue unreliability (it lies — often), the way it poisons search results, hijacks SEO, and is increasingly being used for disinformation and fraud, is reintroducing a fundamental and destabilizing distrust back into the Internet. Once more, I can no longer trust the results Google provides me. On a daily basis I have to ask myself increasingly familiar questions: Is this first result a legitimate news source? Is this image of a protest real? Is that picture of a Kandinsky painting really his or is an AI forgery of his work? Across the board, it’s becoming increasingly hard to tell. For me and countless others, what used to be rote Internet usage has now turned into a nightmarish amount of wasted time spent discerning what is and isn’t real. As far as I, the ordinary user, am concerned, AI is evolving not into a life-changing and labor-saving technology as was promised by its capitalist overlords, but rather into a form of malware that targets, whether unwittingly or not, critical Internet infrastructure. The problem is, the deskilling of Internet usage has made many users helpless against this new threat. While it’s (barely) possible for the savvy among us to use prior knowledge of existing resources and databases, or search engine filters (e.g. by date) to avoid AI-generated content, the more AI becomes enmeshed in critical infrastructure, the more we will once more have to develop a new type of Internet hygiene out of necessity. As I had to navigate this new web more and more, I began noticing that being able to tell the signs of whether a publication is legitimate or AI slop was not so different on its face than being able to tell whether that link to a repository of videogame content is giving virus. AI generated content has a visual and rhetorical trace that is becoming more and more consolidated as the software feeds on its own entrails. Just like landing pages with five DOWNLOAD links and janky websites gave pause in the aughts, fake journalism sites that didn’t exist before 2021 and are just ads and links should give pause now. The good news is, we’ve developed Internet hygiene before and we can do it again. Faced with this threat, new guides to healthy and safe Internet use will have to be written for the common user — especially since it looks like the big tech companies aren’t going to do anything to stem the rot. This is a project that should, in a just society, be taken on by libraries and other public outreach programs. Universities and schools should develop curricula not about how to use or embrace AI but to teach a new form of Internet literacy and usage protocol in order to protect students from scams and disinformation. Hopefully, new tools — a kind of AI anti-virus — will be developed to block AI’s web crawlers or even scan for ersatz content, though this might be wishful thinking considering how the technology works. This task will become especially critical in fields such as medicine, engineering, and law, where AI poisoning has the potential to cause incredible damage that puts human life at risk. But first, all of this requires actually recognizing the existential, infrastructural threat AI poses to the tools modern society now runs on. Those systems faced threats at the dawn of their creation that were no less existential. Call me nostalgic, but the old-school virus prevention framework, I think, is a helpful and time-tested one. Finally, as terrible as the AI infection of the Internet at large is, perhaps a re-skilling of the computer-using population is a silver lining. After two generations of Internet illiteracy, an embrace of new tools for empowerment and understanding can help salvage not only the Internet (if such a thing is still possible) but maybe even some of that old utopianism it once promised. At its core, the computer and the Internet are tools for creation, education, commerce, play, and communication. We as a society shouldn’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. <https://www.late-review.com/p/ai-and-internet-hygiene>

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Curl sotto DDoS da AI
by Giacomo Tesio May 7, 2025

May 7, 2025

Gli sviluppatori di Curl banneranno chi segnala bug individuati da AI. <https://archive.is/IZOug> That's it. I've had it. I'm putting my foot down on this craziness. 1. Every reporter submitting security reports on #Hackerone for #curl now needs to answer this question: "Did you use an AI to find the problem or generate this submission?" (and if they do select it, they can expect a stream of proof of actual intelligence follow-up questions) 2. We now ban every reporter INSTANTLY who submits reports we deem AI slop. A threshold has been reached. We are effectively being DDoSed. If we could, we would charge them for this waste of our time. We still have not seen a single valid security report done with AI help.

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AI as Normal Technology
by Daniela Tafani May 6, 2025

May 6, 2025

AI as Normal Technology An alternative to the vision of AI as a potential superintelligence By Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor April 15, 2025 We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity. The statement “AI is normal technology” is three things: a description of current AI, a prediction about the foreseeable future of AI, and a prescription about how we should treat it. We view AI as a tool that we can and should remain in control of, and we argue that this goal does not require drastic policy interventions or technical breakthroughs. We do not think that viewing AI as a humanlike intelligence is currently accurate or useful for understanding its societal impacts, nor is it likely to be in our vision of the future. The normal technology frame is about the relationship between technology and society. It rejects technological determinism, especially the notion of AI itself as an agent in determining its future. It is guided by lessons from past technological revolutions, such as the slow and uncertain nature of technology adoption and diffusion. It also emphasizes continuity between the past and the future trajectory of AI in terms of societal impact and the role of institutions in shaping this trajectory. In Part I, we explain why we think that transformative economic and societal impacts will be slow (on the timescale of decades), making a critical distinction between AI methods, AI applications, and AI adoption, arguing that the three happen at different timescales. In Part II, we discuss a potential division of labor between humans and AI in a world with advanced AI (but not “superintelligent” AI, which we view as incoherent as usually conceptualized). In this world, control is primarily in the hands of people and organizations; indeed, a greater and greater proportion of what people do in their jobs is AI control. In Part III, we examine the implications of AI as normal technology for AI risks. We analyze accidents, arms races, misuse, and misalignment, and argue that viewing AI as normal technology leads to fundamentally different conclusions about mitigations compared to viewing AI as being humanlike. Of course, we cannot be certain of our predictions, but we aim to describe what we view as the median outcome. We have not tried to quantify probabilities, but we have tried to make predictions that can tell us whether or not AI is behaving like normal technology. In Part IV, we discuss the implications for AI policy. We advocate for reducing uncertainty as a first-rate policy goal and resilience as the overarching approach to catastrophic risks. We argue that drastic interventions premised on the difficulty of controlling superintelligent AI will, in fact, make things much worse if AI turns out to be normal technology— the downsides of which will be likely to mirror those of previous technologies that are deployed in capitalistic societies, such as inequality <https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-as-normal-technology>

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183° Mercoledì di Nexa | 14 maggio 2025, ore 17.00
by Nexa - Media May 6, 2025

May 6, 2025

Gentilissime, gentilissimi, Vi invitiamo a partecipare al 183° Mercoledì di Nexa, che si terrà mercoledì 14 maggio, alle ore 17.00, con un incontro dal titolo "I segni di Proteo". Ospite dell'incontro: Massimo Leone (Università degli Studi di Torino). L'incontro si terrà IN PRESENZA e ONLINE. SEDE FISICA Centro Nexa su Internet e Società, Politecnico di Torino, Via Boggio 65/a, Torino (1° piano). Per accedere alla sala si raccomanda di suonare al citofono Portineria e di seguire le indicazioni segnalate lungo il percorso. QUI<https://nexa.polito.it/contatti> maggiori informazioni su come raggiungerci. STANZA VIRTUALE dell'incontro: https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent Di seguito maggiori dettagli: https://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-183 Cordiali saluti, -- Valeria Bergantino Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Via Pier Carlo Boggio, 65/A - 10138 Torino web: https://nexa.polito.it/ mail: valeria.bergantino(a)polito.it<mailto:valeria.bergantino@polito.it> tel: 3473443585

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Gazaweb, Aiuta a piantare gli "Alberi della Rete" a Gaza
by graffio May 5, 2025

May 5, 2025

Buongiorno lista. Invio questa richiesta di aiuto per un progetto di solidarietà con l'umanità intrappolata nella striscia di Gaza. Da inizio Ottobre 2023 il traffico internet a Gaza è diminuito di oltre l’80%. Le interruzioni sono state causate da una combinazione di attacchi diretti alle infrastrutture di telecomunicazione civili, restrizioni all’accesso all’elettricità e interruzioni tecniche dei servizi di telecomunicazione. L'ong ACS ha avviato da più di un anno il progetto "Gazaweb - Alberi della Rete", sistema internet alternativo per aggirare il blocco israeliano a Gaza. In un contesto devastato da bombardamenti e infrastrutture distrutte, questa rete consente alla popolazione di mantenere legami sociali, comunicare con affetti dispersi nella Striscia e condividere emergenze. L’intervento di emergenza più rapido sul quale *GazaWeb* si è impegnato sono gli eSIM-hotspots, ovvero gli *Alberi della Rete*. Una serie di cellulari di ultima generazione consentono il collegamento ai network internazionali anche con le *eSIM*, carte sim virtuali che (tramite l’attivazione di un codice) svolgono le stesse funzioni di una SIMcard tradizionale. Non potendo inviare materiale fisico all''interno della striscia, è sufficiente inviare il codice di attivazione eSIM (qrcode) a chi possiede uno di questi dispositivi per attivare collegamenti alle reti cellulari egiziane o israeliane dall’interno della striscia di Gaza. La ong *ACS* ha allestito, in coordinamento con i cooperanti presenti a Gaza, una serie di hot-spot via wi-fi connessi a internet tramite eSIM, ognuno dei quali permette la connessione a circa 50 ulteriori dispositivi. In questo modo anche chi non è in possesso di cellulari di ultima generazione può agganciarsi a internet tramite il segnale wi-fi irradiato dall’*Albero della Rete*. ACS ha intenzione di “piantare” un buon numero di Alberi della Rete nei campi profughi e nelle altre aree dove le reti telefoniche non sono accessibili o sono sotto lo stretto controllo delle autorità israeliane. Oltre a essere una soluzione tecnica, questa soluzione rappresenta un simbolo di resilienza collettiva, offrendo connessione umana e speranza in un territorio isolato dal conflitto. *Più eSIM si riescono ad attivare, più si infittisce il bosco degli Alberi della Rete e le relative connessioni.* *Sottoscrivi per far crescere gli alberi della rete: https://aiutagazaweb.vado.li* Per approfondire https://www.acs-italia.it/gazaweb-e-gli-alberi-della-rete/ https://peertube.mesnumeriques.fr/w/26vP1HYDgTgxcz6XMk9stJ Serve aiuto!! grazie -- Maurizio "Graffio" Pillole di informazione digitale - https://pillole.graffio.org/ "C.I.R.C.E. - https://circex.org" AvANa -https://avana.forteprenestino.net/

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