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To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution | Technology | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Dec. 5, 2019

Dec. 5, 2019

<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/17/tech-climate-change-ludd…> Big tech claims AI and digitization will bring a better future. But putting computers everywhere is bad for people and the planet @bentarnoff Last modified on Wed 2 Oct 2019 20.42 BST Our built environment is becoming one big computer. “Smartness” is coming to saturate our stores, workplaces, homes, cities. As we go about our daily lives, data is made, stored, analyzed and used to make algorithmic inferences about us that in turn structure our experience of the world. Computation encircles us as a layer, dense and interconnected. If our parents and our grandparents lived with computers, we live inside them. A growing chorus of activists, journalists and scholars are calling attention to the dangers of digital enclosure. Employers are using algorithmic tools to surveil and control workers. Cops are using algorithmic tools to surveil and control communities of color. And there is no shortage of dystopian possibilities on the horizon: landlords evicting tenants with “smart locks”, health insurers charging higher premiums because your Fitbit says you don’t exercise enough. Digitization doesn’t just pose a risk to people, however. It also poses a risk to the planet. July was the hottest month on record. Large chunks of the Arctic are melting. In India, more than half a billion people face water shortages. Putting computation everywhere directly contributes to this crisis. Digitization is a climate disaster: if corporations and governments succeed in making vastly more of our world into data, there will be less of a world left for us to live in. To understand the relationship between data and climate, the best place to start is machine learning (ML). Billions of dollars are being spent on researching, developing, and deploying ML because major breakthroughs in the past decade have made it a powerful tool for pattern recognition, whether analyzing faces or predicting consumer preferences. ML “learns” by training on large quantities of data. Computers are stupid: babies know what a face is within the first few months of being alive. For a computer to know what a face is, it must learn by looking at millions of pictures of faces. Digitization is a climate disaster: if corporations and governments succeed in making vastly more of our world into data, there will be less of a world left for us to live in This is a demanding process. It takes place inside the data centers we call the cloud, and much of the electricity that powers the cloud is generated by burning fossil fuels. As a result, ML has a large carbon footprint. In a recent paper that made waves in the ML community, a team at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, found that training a model for natural-language processing – the field that helps “virtual assistants” like Alexa understand what you’re saying – can emit as much as 626,155lb of carbon dioxide. That’s about the same amount produced by flying roundtrip between New York and Beijing 125 times. Training models isn’t the only way ML contributes to the cooking of our planet. It has also stimulated a hunger for data that is probably the single biggest driver of the digitization of everything. Corporations and governments now have an incentive to acquire as much data as possible, because that data, with the help of ML, might yield valuable patterns. It might tell them who to fire, who to arrest, when to perform maintenance on a machine or how to promote a new product. One of the best ways to make more data is to put small connected computers everywhere: Cisco predicts there will be 28.5bn networked devices by 2022. Aside from the energy required to manufacture and maintain those devices, the data they produce will live in the carbon-intensive cloud. Data centers currently consume 200 terawatt hours per year – roughly the same amount as South Africa. Anders Andrae, a widely cited researcher at Huawei, tells me that number is likely to grow 4-5 times by 2030. This would put the cloud on par with Japan, the fourth-biggest energy consumer on the planet. What can be done to curb the carbon costs of data? Greenpeace has long pushed cloud providers to switch to renewable energy sources and improve efficiency. These efforts have seen some success: the use of renewables by data centers has grown substantially. Meanwhile, efficiency gains from better techniques and bigger economies of scale have moderated the cloud’s power consumption in recent years. When it comes to ML, a group of researchers are calling for a more energy-conscious approach, which they call “Green AI”. These are encouraging trends, and tech workers themselves are likely to play a key role in advancing them: Amazon employees have been organizing for a climate plan since late last year, and they recently announced a global walkout for 20 September. Among their demands is for the company to commit to zero emissions by 2030 and to stop selling cloud services to fossil fuel companies. But it’s clear that confronting the climate crisis will require something more radical than just making data greener. That’s why we should put another tactic on the table: making less data. We should reject the assumption that our built environment must become one big computer. We should erect barriers against the spread of “smartness” into all of the spaces of our lives. To decarbonize, we need to decomputerize. This proposal will no doubt be met with charges of Luddism. Good: Luddism is a label to embrace. The Luddites were heroic figures and acute technological thinkers. They smashed textile machinery in 19th-century England because they had the capacity to perceive technology “in the present tense”, in the words of the historian David F Noble. They didn’t wait patiently for the glorious future promised by the gospel of progress. They saw what certain machines were doing to them in the present tense – endangering their livelihoods – and dismantled them. We are often sold a similar bill of goods: big tech companies talk incessantly about how “AI” and digitization will bring a better future. In the present tense, however, putting computers everywhere is bad for most people. It enables advertisers, employers and cops to exercise more control over us – in addition to helping heat the planet. Fortunately, there are latter-day Luddites working to stem the tide. Community groups like the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition are organizing to shut down algorithmic policing programs. A growing campaign to ban the government use of facial recognition software has won important victories in San Francisco and Somerville, Massachusetts, while workers at Amazon are calling for the company to stop selling such software to law enforcement. And in the streets of Hong Kong, protesters are developing techniques for evading the algorithmic gaze, using lasers to confuse facial recognition cameras and cutting down “smart” lamp-posts equipped with monitoring devices. These are just a few possible sources of inspiration for a broader movement for decomputerization, one that pursues social and ecological goals simultaneously. The premise of the Green New Deal is that we can make society greener and more equitable at the same time – that we can democratize as we decarbonize. We should apply the same logic to our digital sphere. Preventing a local police department from constructing an ML-powered panopticon is a matter of algorithmic, social and climate justice. As they used to say in the 1960s: one struggle, many fronts. For such a struggle to be successful, however, resistance is not enough. We also need a vision of the future we want. Again, the history of the Luddites can be helpful. In 1812, a group of Yorkshire Luddites sent a factory owner a letter promising continued action until “the House of Commons passes an Act to put down all Machinery hurtful to Commonality”. Following their example, we might derive a simple Luddite principle for democratizing technology: we should destroy machinery hurtful to the common good and build machinery helpful to it. What matters is not only how much data a service collects, but what imprint that service leaves upon the world – and thus whether it should be performed at all What does this mean in practice? It’s hard to think of anything more hurtful to our common life than heating large portions of the planet beyond habitable levels. Privacy advocates have long called for companies to restrict their collection of data to the minimum necessary to perform a service – a principle now enshrined in the GDPR, the EU’s omnibus data regulation. A 21st-century Luddism should embrace this principle but go further. What matters is not only how much data a service collects, but what imprint that service leaves upon the world – and thus whether it should be performed at all. Decomputerization doesn’t mean no computers. It means that not all spheres of life should be rendered into data and computed upon. Ubiquitous “smartness” largely serves to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the many, while inflicting ecological harm that will threaten the survival and flourishing of billions of people. Precisely which computational activities should be preserved in a less computerized world is a matter for those billions of people themselves to decide. The question of whether a particular machine hurts or helps the common good can only be answered by the commons itself. It can only be answered collectively, through the experiment and argument of democracy. The zero-carbon commonwealth of the future must empower people to decide not just how technologies are built and implemented, but whether they’re built and implemented. Progress is an abstraction that has done a lot of damage over the centuries. Luddism urges us to consider: progress towards what and progress for whom? Sometimes a technology shouldn’t exist. Sometimes the best thing to do with a machine is to break it.

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Uber’s “Academic Research” Program: How to Use Famous Economists to Spread Corporate Narratives -
by J.C. DE MARTIN Dec. 5, 2019

Dec. 5, 2019

Uber’s “Academic Research” Program: How to Use Famous Economists to Spread Corporate Narratives Posted on December 5, 2019 by Hubert Horan Uber’s employees co-authored academic papers with brand name scholars that were then used to back the company’s PR and lobbying strategy. Published in respected journals, those articles are based on proprietary data and non-replicable analysis. Moreover, they all don’t discuss the subsidies that make it possible for Uber to pursue market dominance despite its endless losses. https://promarket.org/ubers-academic-research-program-how-to-use-famous-eco… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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‘Short window’ to stop AI taking control of society, warns ex-Google employee
by J.C. DE MARTIN Dec. 5, 2019

Dec. 5, 2019

Short window’ to stop AI taking control of society, warns ex-Google employee Meredith Whittaker warns we are becoming lab animals in a giant tech experiment https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/short-window-to-stop-ai-taki… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Optimal solid state neurons
by Giacomo Tesio Dec. 5, 2019

Dec. 5, 2019

Scusate, ho dimenticato di aggiungere l'oggetto della mail... Giacomo On 05/12/2019, Giacomo Tesio <giacomo(a)tesio.it> wrote: > Bioelectronic medicine is driving the need for neuromorphic > microcircuits that integrate raw nervous stimuli and respond > identically to biological neurons. However, designing such circuits > remains a challenge. Here we estimate the parameters of highly > nonlinear conductance models and derive the ab initio equations of > intracellular currents and membrane voltages embodied in analog > solid-state electronics. By configuring individual ion channels of > solid-state neurons with parameters estimated from large-scale > assimilation of electrophysiological recordings, we successfully > transfer the complete dynamics of hippocampal and respiratory neurons > in silico. The solid-state neurons are found to respond nearly > identically to biological neurons under stimulation by a wide range of > current injection protocols. The optimization of nonlinear models > demonstrates a powerful method for programming analog electronic > circuits. This approach offers a route for repairing diseased > biocircuits and emulating their function with biomedical implants that > can adapt to biofeedback. > > Continua su https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13177-3 > > Ne scrive anche Enrica Battifoglia per Ansa: > http://www.ansa.it/canale_scienza_tecnica/notizie/biotech/2019/12/04/-primo… > > Certamente un ambito di ricerca enormemente interessante dal punto di > vista medico, che magari fra qualche decennio porterà ad una forte > mitigazione dei sintomi delle malattie neurodegenerative. > > Eppure apre anche a scenari inquietanti. > > > Giacomo >

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(no subject)
by Giacomo Tesio Dec. 5, 2019

Dec. 5, 2019

Bioelectronic medicine is driving the need for neuromorphic microcircuits that integrate raw nervous stimuli and respond identically to biological neurons. However, designing such circuits remains a challenge. Here we estimate the parameters of highly nonlinear conductance models and derive the ab initio equations of intracellular currents and membrane voltages embodied in analog solid-state electronics. By configuring individual ion channels of solid-state neurons with parameters estimated from large-scale assimilation of electrophysiological recordings, we successfully transfer the complete dynamics of hippocampal and respiratory neurons in silico. The solid-state neurons are found to respond nearly identically to biological neurons under stimulation by a wide range of current injection protocols. The optimization of nonlinear models demonstrates a powerful method for programming analog electronic circuits. This approach offers a route for repairing diseased biocircuits and emulating their function with biomedical implants that can adapt to biofeedback. Continua su https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13177-3 Ne scrive anche Enrica Battifoglia per Ansa: http://www.ansa.it/canale_scienza_tecnica/notizie/biotech/2019/12/04/-primo… Certamente un ambito di ricerca enormemente interessante dal punto di vista medico, che magari fra qualche decennio porterà ad una forte mitigazione dei sintomi delle malattie neurodegenerative. Eppure apre anche a scenari inquietanti. Giacomo

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The future internet regulation - Aral Balkan at the European Parliament - With Slides - La Quadrature du Net
by J.C. DE MARTIN Dec. 4, 2019

Dec. 4, 2019

Circa 17’ molto ben spesi: https://video.lqdn.fr/videos/watch/861c07f7-7e9b-4e64-9765-cf1de592c8a0 (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Fwd: Job Vacancy post-doc
by J.C. DE MARTIN Dec. 3, 2019

Dec. 3, 2019

-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Job Vacancy post-doc Resent-Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2019 17:29:31 +0100 Resent-From: d004620(a)polito.it Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2019 16:27:33 +0000 From: Sapignoli, Maria <sapignoli(a)eth.mpg.de> To: info(a)nexa.polito.it <info(a)nexa.polito.it> To whom it might concern, Can you please circulate the announcement below in your center, to your networks, PhD students, or other individuals or groups who might be interested in applying for these positions? This is a *post-doc vacancy* for the project */AI/ming Toward the Future: Policing, Governance, and Artificial Intelligence *at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Germany). See file attached and link below. Link: https://recruitingapp-5034.de.umantis.com/Jobs/2%3Flang=eng Login | Bewerbermanagement: Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung | Haufe Talent Management <https://recruitingapp-5034.de.umantis.com/Jobs/2%3Flang=eng> recruitingapp-5034.de.umantis.com Haufe Talent Management Many thanks in advance. Best wishes, Maria Sapignoli Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Advokatenweg 36, 06114 Halle (Saale), Germany www.eth.mpg.de/sapignoli <http://www.eth.mpg.de/sapignoli>

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[Legal Design Roundtable] - 1-2 April, UCLouvain
by Monica Palmirani Dec. 3, 2019

Dec. 3, 2019

Sono a segnalare l'iniziativa sul Legal Design che si terrà nei giorni 1-2 Aprile, presso la UCLouvain - Université Catholique de Louvain, dal titolo "Legal Design Roundtable". http://eitlab.eu/ldr2020-cfp/ =========================================== Full professor of Legal Informatics School of Law Coordinator of MSCA-ITN EJD LAST-JD-RIoE Scientific Director of Legal Blockchain Lab Director of the Summer School LEX Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna C.I.R.S.F.I.D. http://www.cirsfid.unibo.it/ Palazzo Dal Monte Gaudenzi - Via Galliera, 3 I - 40121 BOLOGNA (ITALY) Tel +39 051 277217 Fax +39 051 260782 E-mail monica.palmirani(a)unibo.it<mailto:monica.palmirani@unibo.it>

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How we fixed DRM in Portugal (and so can you)
by Giacomo Tesio Dec. 3, 2019

Dec. 3, 2019

Digital Restrictions Management (originally introduced by the entertainment industry as Digital Rights Management), are technologies that prevent, control, or restrict the use of hardware, software, or other creative works like books, films, music, etc.. They are also known as anti-copy technologies. In 1998 in USA and in 2001 in Europe, these technologies were given legal protection by the lawmakers. Copyright holders convinced the lawmakers that they needed DRM to be protected by the law in order to stop file-sharing without commercial purposes. This legal protection meant that breaking the DRM started to be illegal or a crime. In Portugal, for example, breaking the DRM had a penalty of up to one year in prison, until 2017. Even if you did something legal. In Europe, we have a set of copyright exceptions to guarantee fundamental rights. These are uses of the work we are allowed to do without having to ask permission to the rightholders and authors. Depending on the law in your country, you can make a private copy, use works or parts of works for education and scientific research, quotations for criticism or review. Libraries and other cultural heritage institutions have a set of exceptions that allow them to make available works to the public and to digitally preserve those works, and the press also has a set of exceptions to guarantee the right to information. These exceptions are described in article 5 of the InfoSoc European Directive. When lawmakers gave legal protection to DRM, they didn't really protect these exceptions, which meant that while citizens have these rights, they cannot exercise them, since there is no way to exercise most of them without breaking the DRM. For instance, if you bought a music CD and your country has a private copy exception[^1], you can make a digital copy to listen to its music on your mobile phone. But, if the CD has DRM, while you still have the right to make a copy, you cannot exercise it, since there is no way to make a private copy of a DRMed CD without breaking the DRM, which you are not allowed to do. [...] With the knowledge of how to exercise our rights, we decided to test the law. We got a DVD with DRM and contacted IGAC telling them we wanted to make a private copy, and asked them for the "means" to make such private copy without breaking the DRM. This would be a copyright exception in Portugal, and thus a legal action. The first request we actually made was for the means to legally watch a DVD with DRM on our GNU/Linux laptop, but IGAC didn't understand this request, so we used the private copy exception, which seems to be easier to understand. After pointing IGAC to the law and which exact articles we were trying to exercise, they told us they couldn't give us what we asked since they didn't have those "means", as the rightholders had not deposited them. That is a situation the law didn't foresee, therefore there was no penalty for rightholders that didn't make such a deposit. We made sure to get a written statement from IGAC saying they didn't have those "means" (either to that DVD or anything else), which was important for us to use as a proof that the law at that moment didn't work. [...] During the discussions in the Portuguese Parliament, we pointed out that the law at that time didn't work since IGAC didn't have the "means" needed. We went a step further and claimed that, if they didn't want to change the law as we proposed, they had to at least change it to establish a punishment for the rightholders not handing those "means" over, and that the parliament should invite them to speak, and explain why they didn't do it. Both IGAC and the rightholders were called to the Parliament. Both admitted they didn't have the keys, and the rightholders even added they would never get the keys from the companies that made the DRM systems. # Present your alternative At this point, our feeling was that most members of the parliament knew we were right: the solution the law had didn't and couldn't work. So, they were ready to approve the change in the law. The approved law was proposed by the Left Bloc, with the votes in favour of the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the Greens Party, and the Persons, animals, and Nature Party and was promulgated by the President of Portugal on 2nd of June of 2017. The law also prohibited DRM in public domain works, in new editions of public domain works, and in works published by public entities or funded by public money. Continua su https://fsfe.org/news/2019/news-20191113-01.en.html Giacomo

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The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation
by Giacomo Tesio Dec. 3, 2019

Dec. 3, 2019

Ethos Capital seems on track to complete their takeover of .org early next year. ICANN claims it is powerless to stop the acquisition. ISOC president Andrew Sullivan suggested nothing but a court order would make ISOC change their minds. (To that end, optimists can write to the state DA, who still has to approve the sale.) Sullivan also reported in his latest public letter that the acquisition of PIR (their 990, for reference) was for $1.135B. This seems to be well below the market value of .org, even if the buyer doesn’t reconsider bolder price hikes. Lance Wiggs (investor, consultant, former councillor for InternetNZ) estimates that this undervalues the registry by $1B-10B, depending on how creatively it is managed, and that the investors took almost no risk for a chance at a 5x return. And while there is a range of estimates out there for the true value of .org, the sale price is on the low end under conservative assumptions. How did this happen? Among other things: - No competitive bid. [...] - No public market / sale analysis. [...] - No public story of how the deal came together. [...] - No discussion of alternatives to financing an endowment. [...] Sullivan also shared many conflicting thoughts in an interview with the Register: he thinks not many people care about the sale; public pushback has been strong; the sale would not have happened if there had been public discussion. His presentation of the offer to the ISOC Board also highlighted a need for speed and secrecy, and details were redacted from the board’s minutes. Continua su https://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/12/02/the-dot-org-fire-sale-sold-for-half… Giacomo

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