Testo di Meredith Whittaker
Condivido questo articolo di Meredith Whittaker sulla cattura industriale della ricerca in IA, pubblicato nella rivista dell'ACM Interactions. The steep cost of capture https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/november-december-2021/the-steep-c... "Big tech’s control over AI resources made universities and other institutions dependent on these companies, creating a web of conflicted relationships that threaten academic freedom and our ability to understand and regulate these corporate technologies." (...) "In addition to punishing dissent and denigrating research they find threatening, tech companies are working to co-opt and neutralize critique. They do this in part by funding and elevating their weakest critics, often institutions and coalitions that focus on so-called AI ethics, and frame issues of tech power and dominance as abstract governance questions that take the tech industry's current form as a given and AI's proliferation as inevitable. In parallel, tech firms also champion technocratic remedies such as "AI bias bounties" and fairness fixits that stage tech-enabled discrimination as a problem of bad code and "buggy" engineering [15]. Such approaches make great PR. They also serve to cast elite engineers as the arbiters of "bias," while structurally excluding scholars and advocates who don't have computer science training, but whose focus on the racialized power asymmetries and political economy of AI are essential for understanding and addressing AI harms." (...) "To begin, scholars, advocates, and policymakers who produce and rely on tech-critical work must confront and name the dynamic of tech capture, co-optation, and compromise head-on, and soon. This means incorporating reflexive critiques of the conditions and of knowledge creation, and the compromises and trade-offs faced by knowledge workers over whom interested institutions have power. Given the politics of collegial proximity that inform academic prestige networks while working to blur the lines between academic and industry workers, this is certain to be uncomfortable. But naming these dynamics is the only way to address them and to stage questions that allow us to envision and demand alternative futures." -- Antonio A. Casilli Professor, Telecom Paris-Institut Polytechnique de Paris Member, Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation (CNRS) Associate Member, LACI-IIAC (EHESS) Associate researcher, Weizenbaum-Institut, Berlin Member, Scholarly council UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2) Faculty Fellow, Nexa Center for Internet & Society *We respect your right to disconnect. This email send time is due to my own workflow efficiency. You are in no obligation to take action or reply to it outside your office hours.*
Buongiorno, attenzione a non prendere l'abbaglio che queste dinamiche siano determinate da ratio economiche (e tantomeno scientifiche intese come tensione ideale al miglioramento della conoscenza umana), perché tutto questo non sarebbe sostenibile da un punto di vista economico. ...semmai è molto profittevole da un punto di vista /fintech/, parecchio slegato dalla cosiddetta "economia reale" Antonio Casilli <antonio.casilli@telecom-paris.fr> writes:
Condivido questo articolo di Meredith Whittaker sulla cattura industriale della ricerca in IA, pubblicato nella rivista dell'ACM Interactions.
The steep cost of capture https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/november-december-2021/the-steep-c...
ci sono alcuni passaggi dell'articolo che non devono essere sottovalutati: --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- Examining the history of the U.S. military's influence over scientific research during the Cold War, we see parallels to the tech industry's current influence over AI. This history also offers alarming examples of the way in which U.S. military dominance worked to shape academic knowledge production, and to punish those who dissented. Today, the tech industry is facing mounting regulatory pressure, and is increasing its efforts to create tech-positive narratives and to silence and sideline critics in much the same way the U.S. military and its allies did in the past. [...] monopolistic control of these resources gave a handful of tech companies the authority to (re)define the AI field, while enclosing knowledge about AI systems behind corporate secrecy. [...] In March 2020, the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), chaired by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and helmed by other tech executives, recommended that the U.S. government fund what it termed a national AI research infrastructure, in the name of "democratizing" access to AI research. This recommendation was picked up in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), [...] Germane to our case is the power that this gave the U.S. military over the direction of scientific research and the institutions that housed it. This influence was applied not only to ensure that academic research was animated by U.S. military questions and concerns but also to punish whistleblowers, chill dissent, and incentivize complacency in the face of overblown claims masked in scientific authority. It is here, in these darker histories, that we confront the steep cost of capture—whether military or industrial—and its perilous implications for academic freedom and knowledge production capable of holding power to account. --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- (quindi, di nuovo, la cosa NON riguarda solo l'AI o l'informatica) secondo me ci sono evidenti collagamenti con quanto detto da Giovanni Leghissa in questo thread: https://server-nexa.polito.it/pipermail/nexa/2021-December/022716.html in merito ai programmi NATO relativi alla cognitive warfare in altre parole, non è del tutto infondato sospettare che oggi il dominio militare U.S. agisca attraverso le cosiddette Big Tech nel modellare la produzione di conoscenza (o addirittura la (contro)manipolazione delle menti), in ambito accademico e non solo. c'è "solo" una cosa sulla quale sono in totale disaccordo con l'autrice dell'articolo: --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- Even if it were desirable (which, given AI's harms and flaws, must be open to question), there is no plausible scenario in which a national research infrastructure could be meaningfully constructed outside of the current tech-industry ecosystem. --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- ...come se il "current tech-industry ecosystem" fosse eterno o /addirittura/ essere capace di (auto)emendarsi dall'interno... o /INCREDIBILMENTE/ capace di autosostenersi da solo: suvvia! sono fermamente convinto che questo enorme fraintendimento di fondo derivi dal fatto che gli anglofoni insistano a usare il termine "computer science", come se "computing" esaurisse in sè tutto quello che si può fare con l'informatica. :-O [...] Saluti, 380° P.S.: tra le righe dell'articolo si nota con particolare evidenza che una strategia impiegata per aumentare il dominio militar-industriale sulla cosiddetta "società civile" è quella di precarizzare a dismisura il lavoro... oltre che "divide et impera" i lavoratori, perché io trovo che sia razzismo di classe definire /alcuni/ lavoratori "knowledge workers", come se gli altri fossero "braccia senza cervello". -- 380° (Giovanni Biscuolo public alter ego) «Noi, incompetenti come siamo, non abbiamo alcun titolo per suggerire alcunché» Disinformation flourishes because many people care deeply about injustice but very few check the facts. Ask me about <https://stallmansupport.org>.
participants (2)
-
380° -
Antonio Casilli