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Facebook pumps $7.5m into an independent AI ethics centre (c/o Uni Munich)
by gabriele elia Jan. 23, 2019

Jan. 23, 2019

quante università italiane hanno 7.5 Mni€ di budget per AI? e quante da una solo convenzione? https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/2019/01/21/facebook-independent… [https://i2.wp.com/www.artificialintelligence-news.com/wp-content/uploads/20…]<https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/2019/01/21/facebook-independent…> Facebook pumps $7.5m into an independent AI ethics centre<https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/2019/01/21/facebook-independent…> An independent AI ethics research centre is set to receive $7.5 million of funding courtesy of the folks at Facebook. The new research centre is called the Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence and was created in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich (TUM). www.artificialintelligence-news.com An independent AI ethics research centre is set to receive $7.5 million of funding courtesy of the folks at Facebook. The new research centre is called the Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence and was created in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Facebook, like many companies, is fighting outside concerns about the development of AI and its potential societal impact. The centre should help to ensure Facebook keeps up with ethical best practices. Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, Director of Applied Machine Learning at Facebook, wrote in a blog post: “At Facebook, ensuring the responsible and thoughtful use of AI is foundational to everything we do — from the data labels we use, to the individual algorithms we build, to the systems they are a part of. We’re developing new tools like Fairness Flow, which can help generate metrics for evaluating whether there are unintended biases in certain models. We also work with groups like the Partnership for AI, of which Facebook is a founding member, and the AI4People initiative. However, AI poses complex problems which industry alone cannot answer, and the independent academic contributions of the Institute will play a crucial role in furthering ethical research on these topics.” Independent, evidence-based research will be conducted by the institute to provide insight and guidance for society, industry, legislators, and decision-makers across the private and public sectors. Furthermore, the institute wants to specifically address the concerns surrounding AI such as safety, privacy, fairness, and transparency.

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Itasec 2019 a Pisa dal 12 al 15 febbraio
by Arturo Di Corinto Jan. 22, 2019

Jan. 22, 2019

Cari nexiani, forse alcuni di voi lo sanno, visto che Torino è un nodo del Laboratorio Nazionale di cybersecurity, ma vorrei ricordare a quelli che pensano di venire a Itasec19, la terza conferenza nazionale organizzata dal laboratorio che il giorno 27 termina la possibilità di iscriversi con uno sconto sostanziale alla conferenza. Per questo vi giro la lettera del presidente del CINI e direttore del Laboratorio, prof. Paolo Prinetto. un salutone --------------------------------> Sono ancora aperte le Early Registration a ITA*SEC*19 <https://consorzio-cini.us14.list-manage.com/track/click?u=30db5cf0f27d2310f…> fino al 27 gennaio p.v.. ITA*SEC*, la prima Conferenza Italiana sulla Cybersecurity, è un evento annuale organizzato dal Laboratorio Nazionale di Cybersecurity del CINI. L’edizione 2019 si terrà a Pisa, presso la sede del CNR, dal 12 al 15 febbraio 2019. ITA*SEC*19 <https://consorzio-cini.us14.list-manage.com/track/click?u=30db5cf0f27d2310f…> inizierà martedì 12 febbraio con un’intera giornata dedicata a Workshop Scientifici e Tutorial: i primi approfondiranno aspetti legati alla ricerca, mentre i secondi illustreranno temi di interesse generale. ITA*SEC*19 <https://consorzio-cini.us14.list-manage.com/track/click?u=30db5cf0f27d2310f…> proseguirà poi da mercoledì 13 a venerdì 15 con la Conferenza organizzata in tre Spazi principali: lo *Spazio Stakeholder*, lo *Spazio Scientifico/Tecnico* e lo *Spazio Espositivo*. La partecipazione allo Spazio Stakeholder e allo Spazio Espositivo è gratuita. L’accesso al Workshop e Tutorial Day e a tutte le altre sessioni della Conferenza prevede invece una quota di registrazione. E’ obbligatorio per tutti registrarsi tramite il sito ufficiale www.itasec.it <https://consorzio-cini.us14.list-manage.com/track/click?u=30db5cf0f27d2310f…> al seguente link: https://consorzio-cini.formstack.com/forms/registration_to_ita_sec_2019 <https://consorzio-cini.us14.list-manage.com/track/click?u=30db5cf0f27d2310f…> . Sul sito sono riportati anche il programma completo e i dettagli sui vari aspetti logistici. Può seguirci su Twitter.@cybersecnatlab. <https://consorzio-cini.us14.list-manage.com/track/click?u=30db5cf0f27d2310f…> Con l'auspicio di poterla incontrare in occasione della Conferenza, colgo l’occasione per porgerle i più cordiali saluti. Prof. Paolo Prinetto Direttore del Laboratorio Nazionale di Cybersecurity - CINI -- Arturo Di Corinto www.dicorinto.it ---------------------------------> AVVERTENZE AI SENSI DEL D.Lgs. 196/2003 Le informazioni contenute in questo messaggio di posta elettronica e/o nel/i file/s allegato/i sono da considerarsi strettamente riservate. Il loro utilizzo è consentito esclusivamente al destinatario del messaggio, per le finalità indicate nel messaggio stesso. Qualora riceviate questo messaggio senza esserne il destinatario, Vi preghiamo cortesemente di darcene notizia via e-mail e di procedere alla distruzione del messaggio stesso, cancellandolo dal Vostro sistema. Conservare il messaggio stesso, divulgarlo anche in parte, distribuirlo ad altri soggetti, copiarlo, od utilizzarlo per finalità diverse, costituisce comportamento contrario ai principi dettati dal D.Lgs. 196/2003

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The CNIL’s restricted committee imposes a financial penalty of 50 Million euros against GOOGLE LLC
by Francesco Mecca Jan. 22, 2019

Jan. 22, 2019

https://www.cnil.fr/en/cnils-restricted-committee-imposes-financial-penalty… On 21 January 2019, the CNIL’s restricted committee imposed a financial penalty of 50 Million euros against the company GOOGLE LLC, in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), for lack of transparency, inadequate information and lack of valid consent regarding the ads personalization. -- Francesco Mecca me(a)francescomecca.eu

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ACLU sues for records on facial recognition use by the Department of Justice
by Alberto Cammozzo Jan. 22, 2019

Jan. 22, 2019

<https://www.fedscoop.com/aclu-foia-facial-recognition-department-of-justice/> The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Department of Justice demanding any records on the agency’s use of facial recognition technology. The request seeks records from the DOJ as a whole, as well as component agencies the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration. The request is extensive <https://www.aclu.org/aclu-foia-request-doj-facial-recognition>. The organization is asking for 20 distinct sets of records ranging from any policy direction on the use facial recognition to “records relating to inquiries to companies, solicitations from companies, or meetings with companies about the purchase, piloting, or testing of face recognition, gait recognition, or voice recognition technology” and beyond. The group additionally wants any records showing the accuracy rates of the systems employed and records showing what audit work has been done to determine or assess the accuracy rate. This news is just the latest in the ACLU’s strong ongoing opposition to the use of facial recognition technology by government entities. The ACLU filed a similar request with the Department of Homeland Security in October 2018. In contrast to this most recent FOIA, though, which seeks information regardless of the vendor of the technology, the DHS FOIA focused on learning more about the agency’s work with Amazon’s Rekognition software. Just last week, the ACLU and a coalition of other civil rights groups wrote letters to the three big purveyors of facial recognition technology — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — demanding in no uncertain terms <https://www.fedscoop.com/aclu-demands-amazon-microsoft-google-stop-facial-r…> that they cease doing business with government customers. And over the summer, the group put members of Congress in the facial recognition crosshairs <https://www.fedscoop.com/aclu-puts-members-congress-facial-recognition-cros…> to see how they’d react. While this last action — a study in which 28 sitting members of Congress were falsely identified as individuals who have been arrested for a crime — prompted some action from lawmakers <https://www.fedscoop.com/amazon-rekognition-lawmakers-letters-again/>, federal agencies have remained pretty quiet. The companies developing the technology have also reacted to public criticism differently. Google, notably, has backed down <https://www.fedscoop.com/google-jedi-drops-out-artificial-intelligence/> from some government work, citing its new AI principles, and Microsoft has argued for proactive regulation <https://www.fedscoop.com/public-contrast-google-microsoft-says-itll-stay-en…>. Amazon, meanwhile, a company that is often the target of the ACLU’s opposition, has maintained <https://www.fedscoop.com/amazon-support-government-customers-teresa-carlson/> that facial recognition is a positive and powerful tool for government. “There have always been and will always be risks with new technology capabilities,” Dr. Matt Wood, head of AI at AWS, wrote in a blog post <https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/some-quick-thoughts-on-the-public-discussi…> this summer. “But we believe it is the wrong approach to impose a ban on promising new technologies because they might be used by bad actors for nefarious purposes in the future.”

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'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism
by Vincenzo Mario Bruno Giorgino Jan. 22, 2019

Jan. 22, 2019

'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-s… Vi giro la connessione ad un'intervista all'autrice di Surveillance Capitalism che può interessare molti. Buona giornata, Vincenzo Giorgino

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The CNIL’s restricted committee imposes a financial penalty of 50 Million euros against GOOGLE LLC
by Claudio Agosti Jan. 21, 2019

Jan. 21, 2019

https://www.cnil.fr/en/cnils-restricted-committee-imposes-financial-penalty… A me la parte più affascinante sembra essere quella che riporto sotto. perchè è noto che ogni trattamento deve avere un opt-in chiaro e separato; ora c'è da usare questa sentenza come spauracchio vero ogni altro servizio che accorpa tutti i trattamenti in una sola checkbox? Finally, before creating an account, the user is asked to tick the boxes « *I agree to Google’s Terms of Service*» and « *I agree to the processing of my information as described above and further explained in the Privacy Policy*» in order to create the account. Therefore, the user gives his or her consent in full, for all the processing operations purposes carried out by GOOGLE based on this consent (ads personalization, speech recognition, etc.). However, the GDPR provides that the consent is “specific” only if it is given distinctly for each purpose. -- Claudio Agosti, https://facebook.tracking.exposed, @_vecna PGP keybase.io/vecna - Research Associate - DATACTIVE University of Amsterdam https://data-activism.net

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66° Nexa Lunch Seminar | 23 gennaio 2019
by Nexa Media Jan. 21, 2019

Jan. 21, 2019

Nexa Center for Internet and Society Newsletter Se non visualizzi correttamente questo messaggio clicca qui <http://nexa.polito.it/lunch-66> NEXA 66° Nexa Lunch Seminar Mercoledi 23 gennaio 2019, ore 13.00 - 14.00 Politecnico di Torino http://nexa.polito.it/lunch-66 AI Oracle 2081 Speaker Piera Riccio (Politecnico di Torino) This event will be webcast live: http://nexa.polito.it/upcoming-events Quando si parla di tecnologia, automazione, intelligenza artificiale e le loro implementazioni nella nostra realtà quotidiana, è necessario avere una consapevolezza di quale potrà essere *il futuro della società umana*, specialmente per quanto riguarda il mondo del lavoro. Sin dall'antichità, l’essere umano ha consultato oracoli al fine di cercare una guida per l'interpretazione del proprio futuro. Ma se la tecnologia è diventata così intelligente, allora *perché non interpellare l’intelligenza artificiale stessa?* AI Oracle 2081 <https://aioracle.info/> simula una realtà distopica in cui a ogni essere umano verrà assegnato il lavoro ideale, scelto a seconda di alcuni dati sensibili analizzati da un’intelligenza artificiale. Si tratta un’*installazione artistica interattiva *che mira a spronare i visitatori a riflettere su alcune problematiche etiche riguardanti gli eventuali pregiudizi degli algoritmi intelligenti e sulle conseguenze che questi ultimi possano avere nei contesti in cui vengono implementati processi decisionali autonomi. /Ingresso libero - Sarà disponibile un leggero rinfresco per coloro che si saranno registrati su http://lunch66.eventbrite.com entro il 21 gennaio./ BIOGRAFIE - e informazioni supplementari [RICCIO] *Piera RICCIO* ha 22 anni e proviene da San Potito Sannitico, un piccolo paese di montagna in provincia di Caserta. All’età di 19 anni si è trasferita a Torino, iscrivendosi al corso di laurea triennale in Ingegneria del Cinema e dei Mezzi di Comunicazione presso il Politecnico, concludendo il percorso nel 2018. Nell’estate del 2017, è stata intern presso il Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society (Harvard University). Da sempre è particolarmente interessata allo sviluppo tecnologico e alle sue possibili intersezioni con altri ambiti della società, infatti è attualmente iscritta al corso di laurea magistrale in ICT for Smart Societies. Letture consigliate e link utili: * Joy Buolamwini, /How I'm fighting bias in algorithms <https://www.ted.com/talks/joy_buolamwini_how_i_m_fighting_bias_in_algorithm…>/, (TED Talk). * AI Now 2017, /Report. <https://ainowinstitute.org/AI_Now_2017_Report.pdf>/. * Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner, /Machine Bias <https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-crimina…>/, ProPublica. * /AI and the future of work <https://www.wired.com/wiredinsider/2018/04/ai-future-work/>/, Wired. * James Vincent, /Google ‘fixed’ its racist algorithm by removing gorillas from its image-labeling tech <https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas-photo-re…>/, The Verge. Che cosa sono il Centro Nexa e i cicli di incontri “Mercoledì di Nexa” e “Nexa Lunch Seminar” #lunch66 <https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=%23lunch66&src=typd> #aioracle <https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=%23aioracle&src=typd> #ai4art <https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=%23ai4art&src=typd> Il Centro Nexa su Internet & Società del Politecnico di Torino (Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica) è un centro di ricerca indipendente e interdisciplinare che studia Internet e il suo effetto sulla società. Maggiori informazioni all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/about. Durante i “*Mercoledì di Nexa*”, che si tengono *ogni 2° mercoledì del mese* alle *ore 18 in punto*, il Centro Nexa su Internet e Società apre le sue porte non solo agli esperti e a tutti coloro i quali lavorano con Internet, ma anche a semplici appassionati e cittadini. Il ciclo di incontri intende approfondire, con un linguaggio preciso ma divulgativo, i temi legati alla Rete: motori di ricerca, Creative Commons, social networks, open source/software libero, neutralità della rete, libertà di espressione, privacy, file sharing, big e open data, smart cities e molto altro. Al centro di quasi tutti gli incontri un ospite pronto a dialogare con i direttori del Centro Nexa, il Prof. Juan Carlos De Martin del Politecnico di Torino e il Prof. Marco Ricolfi dell'Università di Torino, nonché lo staff e i Fellows del Centro Nexa. Maggiori informazioni sui Mercoledì di Nexa, incluso un elenco di tutti i “Mercoledì” passati, sono disponibili all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi. Si segnala inoltre che dal maggio 2012 *ogni 4° mercoledì* del mese *dalle ore 13 alle ore 14* il Centro Nexa organizza anche i "*Nexa Lunch Seminar*". Una lista di tutti i “Lunch Seminar” passati è disponibile all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/lunch-seminars. See our events calendar <http://nexa.polito.it/events> if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions, lectures, and conferences not listed in this email. Our events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted. Responsabile Comunicazione Centro Nexa su Internet & Società: *Francesco Ruggiero*, tel: +39 011 090 7219, Mob: +39 349 1335082, francesco.ruggiero(a)polito.it <mailto:francesco.ruggiero@polito.it>. Maggiori informazioni sui Mercoledì di Nexa e i Nexa Lunch Seminar, sono disponibili all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/events. Weekly Events Newsletter. Sign up <http://nexa.polito.it/mailing-lists> to receive this newsletter if this email was forwarded to you. To manage your subscription preferences, please click here <https://server-nexa.polito.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nexa>. Connect & get involved: Jobs, internships, and more <http://nexa.polito.it/get-involved>.

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'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism | Technology | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Jan. 21, 2019

Jan. 21, 2019

<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-s…> Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is a chilling exposé of the business model that underpins the digital world. Observer tech columnist John Naughton explains the importance of Zuboff’s work and asks the author 10 key questions We’re living through the most profound transformation in our information environment since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing in circa 1439. And the problem with living through a revolution is that it’s impossible to take the long view of what’s happening. Hindsight is the only exact science in this business, and in that long run we’re all dead. Printing shaped and transformed societies over the next four centuries, but nobody in Mainz (Gutenberg’s home town) in, say, 1495 could have known that his technology would (among other things): fuel the Reformation and undermine the authority of the mighty Catholic church; enable the rise of what we now recognise as modern science; create unheard-of professions and industries; change the shape of our brains; and even recalibrate our conceptions of childhood. And yet printing did all this and more. [...]

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Autonomous weapons and the new laws of war -- A technology that may prove hard to restrain
by Alberto Cammozzo Jan. 19, 2019

Jan. 19, 2019

<https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/01/19/autonomous-weapons-and-the-ne…> [...] The challenge that modern armed forces, and armsmakers like IAI, are working on is the ability to pick the target out from a field of non-targets. There are two technological developments that make the challenge a timely one. One is that computers are far more powerful than they used to be and, thanks to “machine learning”, getting much more sophisticated in their ability to distinguish between objects. If an iPhone can welcome your face but reject your sibling’s, why shouldn’t a missile be able to distinguish a tank from a school bus? The change is that autonomy in the non-killing aspects of military life is spreading like wildfire. Drones, driverless trucks and crewless submarines are all being used for various purposes, most of them entirely non-lethal. At the British Army’s “Autonomous Warrior” exercise in December 2018, on the wet and windswept training grounds of Salisbury Plain in southern England, military officers showed off autonomous vehicles and aircraft designed to watch enemy lines, evacuate wounded soldiers and deliver supplies over the perilous “last mile” up to the front line. “Think C-3PO,” says one officer, “not the Terminator.” Autonomous vehicles do not have to become autonomous weapons, even when capable of deadly force. The Reaper drones with which America assassinates enemies are under firm human control when it comes to acts of violence, even though they can fly autonomously. Satellite remote control, though, involves a time delay which would matter more were the drones being shot at in an all-out war. Co-operation may be better with humans out of the loop, too. The Pentagon’s out-there-thinking department, DARPA, is working on autonomous attack swarms more like a murmuration of starlings than a formation of fighter-bombers. What human operators could co-ordinate such dynamics? This is not just an issue for the future. One of the advantages that MDBA, a European missile-maker, boasts for its air-to-ground Brimstones is that they can “self-sort” based on firing order. If different planes launch volleys of Brimstones into the same “kill box”, where they are free to do their worst, the missiles will keep tabs on each other to reduce the chance that two strike the same target. Cost is also a factor in armies where trained personnel are pricey. “The thing about robots is that they don’t have pensions,” says General Sir Richard Barrons, one of Britain’s most senior commanders until 2016. Nor do they have dependents. The loss of a robot is measured in money and capability, not human potential. If keeping a human in the loop was merely a matter of spending more, it might be deemed worthwhile regardless. But human control creates vulnerabilities. It means that you must pump a lot of encrypted data back and forth. What if the necessary data links are attacked physically—for example with anti-satellite weapons—jammed electronically or subverted through cyberwarfare? Future wars are likely to be fought in what America’s armed forces call “contested electromagnetic environments”. The Royal Air Force is confident that encrypted data links would survive such environments. But air forces have an interest in making sure there are still jobs for pilots; this may leave them prey to unconscious bias. The vulnerability of communication links to interference is an argument for greater autonomy. But autonomous systems can be interfered with, too. The sensors for weapons like Brimstone need to be a lot more fly than those required by, say, self-driving cars, not just because battlefields are chaotic, but also because the other side will be trying to disorient them. Just as some activists use asymmetric make-up to try to confuse face-recognition systems, so military targets will try to distort the signatures which autonomous weapons seek to discern. Paul Scharre, author of “Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War”, warns that the neural networks used in machine learning are intrinsically vulnerable to spoofing. Judgment day New capabilities, reduced costs, resistance to countermeasures and the possibility of new export markets are all encouraging R&D in autonomous weapons. To nip this in the bud, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is calling for a pre-emptive ban on “fully autonomous” weapons. The trouble is that there is little agreement on where the line is crossed. Switzerland, for instance, says that autonomous weapons are those able to act “in partial or full replacement of a human in the use of force, notably in the targeting cycle”, thus encompassing Harop and Brimstone, among many others. Britain, by contrast, says autonomous weapons are only those “capable of understanding higher level intent and direction”. That excludes everything in today’s arsenals, or for that matter on today’s drawing boards. Partly in order to sort these things out, in 2017 the UN’s Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons formalised its earlier discussions of the issues by creating a group of governmental experts (GGE) to study the finer points of autonomy. As well as trying to develop a common understanding of what weapons should be considered fully autonomous, it is considering both a blanket ban and other options for dealing with the humanitarian and security challenges that they create. Most states involved in the convention’s discussions agree on the importance of human control. But they differ on what this actually means. In a paper for Article 36, an advocacy group named after a provision of the Geneva conventions that calls for legal reviews on new methods of warfare, Heather Roff and Richard Moyes argue that “a human simply pressing a ‘fire’ button in response to indications from a computer, without cognitive clarity or awareness” is not really in control. “Meaningful control”, they say, requires an understanding of the context in which the weapon is being used as well as capacity for timely and reasoned intervention. It also requires accountability. Lieutenant-colonel Richard Craig, who leads the British Army HQ’s research on autonomous systems, agrees that context is crucial. In some contexts it might be right to vet every target. In others it is sufficient to understand the threat and act accordingly. For example a Phalanx system, he says, “wouldn’t be in fully autonomous mode unless there was a high threat. Meaningful human control is to turn it on into that mode, and then to turn it off”. This means that future robot warplanes, such as those being explored by the French-led nEUROn programme and Britain’s Taranis, both of which are experimenting with automatic target recognition, present the biggest challenge. Long-legged as they are, they may encounter a wide range of target environments that could be hard to anticipate. They could be in or out of meaningful human control depending on where they end up, the competence and experience of the operators, what is likely to step into their path and, potentially, changes to their algorithms made through on-board machine learning. A field day for ethicists; a nightmare for the would-be treaty-makers. The two dozen states that want a legally binding ban on fully autonomous weapons are mostly military minnows like Djibouti and Peru, but some members, such as Austria, have diplomatic sway. None of them has the sort of arms industry that stands to profit from autonomous weapons. They ground their argument in part on International Humanitarian Law (IHL), a corpus built around the rules of war laid down in the Hague and Geneva conventions. This demands that armies distinguish between combatants and civilians, refrain from attacks where the risk to civilians outweighs the military advantage, use no more force than is proportional to the objective and avoid unnecessary suffering. When it comes to making distinctions, Vincent Boulanin and Maaike Verbruggen, experts at SIPRI, note that existing target-recognition systems, for all their recent improvement, remain “rudimentary”, often vulnerable to bad weather or cluttered backgrounds. Those that detect humans are “very crude”. And this is before wily enemies try to dupe the robots into attacking the wrong things. Necessity and proportionality, which requires weighing human lives against military aims, are even more difficult. “However sophisticated new machines may be, that is beyond their scope,” says Major Kathleen McKendrick of the British army. An army that uses autonomous weapons needs to be set up so as to be able to make proportionality decisions before anything is fired. Salvation? More broadly, IHL is shaped by the “Martens clause”, originally adopted in the Hague convention of 1899. This says that new weapons must comply with “the principles of humanity” and “dictates of public conscience”. Bonnie Docherty of Human Rights Watch, the NGO which co-ordinates the anti-robot campaign, argues that, “As autonomous machines, fully autonomous weapons could not appreciate the value of human life and the significance of its loss...They would thus fail to respect human dignity.” A strong argument, but hardly legally watertight; other philosophies are available. As for the dictates of public conscience, research and history show that they are more flexible than a humanitarian would wish. Leaving aside law and ethics, autonomous weapons could pose new destabilising risks. Automatic systems can interact in seemingly unpredictable ways, as when trading algorithms cause “flash crashes” on stockmarkets. Mr Scharre raises the possibility of a flash war caused by “a cascade of escalating engagements”. “If we are open to the idea that humans make bad decisions”, says Peter Roberts, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank, “we should also be open to the idea that AI systems will make bad decisions—just faster.” Beyond the core group advocating a ban there is a range of opinions. China has indicated that it supports a ban in principle; but on use, not development. France and Germany oppose a ban, for now; but they want states to agree a code of conduct with wriggle room “for national interpretations”. India, which chaired the GGE, is reserving its position. It is eager to avoid a repeat of nuclear history, in which technological have-nots were locked out of game-changing weaponry by a discriminatory treaty. At the far end of the spectrum a group of states, including America, Britain and Russia, explicitly opposes the ban. These countries insist that existing international law provides a sufficient check on all future systems—not least through Article 36 reviews, which they say should be taken more seriously rather than ducked, as some countries do today. They argue that the law should not be governed by the shortcomings of current systems when it comes to, say, discrimination. Some even argue that autonomous weapons might make war more humane. Human warriors break the IHL rules. Properly programmed robots might be unable to. Samsung’s SGR-A1 sentry gun, which used to be deployed in the DMZ, could recognise hands being thrown to the air and weapons to the ground as signs of surrender that meant do not shoot. All sorts of similar context-sensitive IHL-based restraint might be written into its descendants’ programming. But how long until an embattled army decided to loosen such tethers and let slip the robodogs of war? Which brings back one of the biggest problems that advocates of bans and controls have to face. Arms control requires verification, and this will always be a vexed issue when it comes to autonomy. “The difference between an MQ-9 Reaper and an autonomous version is software, not hardware,” says Michael Horowitz of the University of Pennsylvania. “It would be extremely hard to verify using traditional arms-control techniques.” The urge to restrict the technology before it is widely fielded, and used, is understandable. If granting weapons ever more autonomy turns out, in practice, to yield a military advantage, and if developed countries see themselves in wars of national survival, rather than the wars of choice they have waged recently, past practice suggests that today’s legal and ethical restraints may fall away. States are likely to sacrifice human control for self-preservation, says General Barrons. “You can send your children to fight this war and do terrible things, or you can send machines and hang on to your children.” Other people’s children are other people’s concern.

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"Japan seeks to ban global tech giants from using content contained in emails and other data"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Jan. 19, 2019

Jan. 19, 2019

*Japan seeks to ban global tech giants from using content contained in emails and other data* The communications ministry plans to prohibit global information technology giants from using email content and other communications data without users’ consent, informed sources said Friday. [...] continua qui: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/01/19/national/japan-ban-global-tech…

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