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

April 16, 2019

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

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

April 16, 2019

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

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

April 16, 2019

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

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

April 16, 2019

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

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

April 15, 2019

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

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Sarà l'Europa ad arginare lo strapotere degli algoritmi? | F. Barca
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 15, 2019

April 15, 2019

https://www.lavoce.info/archives/58576/strapotere-degli-algoritmi-che-fare/ (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Why the Moral Machine is a monster
by Giacomo Tesio April 15, 2019

April 15, 2019

https://robots.law.miami.edu/2019/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/MoralMachineMo… The Moral Machine is a good-faith effort to help us think about how autonomous vehicles should be programmed. But unfortunately it's also deeply unhelpful, all the moreso because it received the imprimatur of Nature and then went viral, so that it now drives the discussion about the ethics of AVs. If we want to get the discourse back on track, we may well need not just a way of framing the question that avoids the Moral Machine's methodological errors, but also one that shares the Moral Machine's clickbaity features. Can we make a gamified interface for the structural questions?

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Safeguards for human studies can’t cope with big data
by antonio.vetro＠polito.it April 15, 2019

April 15, 2019

A 40 anni dal report Belmont, le comunità scientifiche riconoscono l'esigenza di un "report Belmont 2.0" che tenga conto della c.d. rivoluzione digitale https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01164-z == Sent from my wireless device ==

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Il testo della proposta "Algorithmic Accountability Act"
by Antonio Vetro' April 15, 2019

April 15, 2019

Non credo sia passata in lista -e se sì- me ne scuso. Il testo della Algorithmic Accountability Act proposto qualche giorno fa in Senato USA: "To direct the Federal Trade Commission to require entities that use, store, or share personal information to conduct automated decision system impact assessments and data protection impact assessments. “ […] https://www.scribd.com/document/405802106/Algorithmic-Accountability-Act-of… <https://www.scribd.com/document/405802106/Algorithmic-Accountability-Act-of…> av

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Microsoft reveals hackers accessed some Outlook.com accounts for months
by Giacomo April 15, 2019

April 15, 2019

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/13/18309192/microsoft-outlook-email-account… Microsoft has started notifying some Outlook.com users that a hacker was able to access accounts for months earlier this year. The software giant discovered that a support agent’s credentials were compromised for its web mail service, allowing unauthorized access to some accounts between January 1st and March 28th, 2019. Microsoft says the hackers could have viewed account email addresses, folder names, and subject lines of emails, but not the content of emails or attachments.

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