Thanks for being a subscriber, and for your kind attention. If you need anything, please ping me via
|
|
April 17 · Issue #30 · View online
The best links and must-reads aggregated by Gerd Leonhard, Futurist & Humanist, Keynote Speaker, Author of 'Technology vs Humanity', Film-Maker, and CEO of The Futures Agency in Zürich / Switzerland.
|
|
Thanks for being a subscriber, and for your kind attention. If you need anything, please ping me via this contact form. Kind regards from Zurich !
|
|
|
Welcome to the 30th issue of our Humanity Futures newsletter, part of our continuing #TechVsHuman conversation. This newsletter is co-created by Futures Agency Curator Peter Van. Happy reading! Gerd Leonhard. 📌 Need more context to understand our weekly futurist updates? Try Gerd’s best-selling book ‘Technology vs Humanity’, now available in 11 languages. 👈
|
|
How we decide who decides
Good analysis: includes interesting maturity model “Decision Automation Continuum.” “While machines can and will magnify our thinking and apply it to data faster and more accurately than we can without assistance, they still can’t think for us. Advantage: human.”
|
|
Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI - Digital Single Market - European Commission
Probably the highlight of the week. The EU independent expert group released this week their ethics guidelines for trustworthy artificial intelligence. You can download the official version here. We gathered some reactions below.
|
AI systems should be accountable, explainable, and unbiased, says EU
The EU says these technologies should be accountable and explainable, and they should not coerce of trick users. Some experts love it, others are more skeptical: “In our view the EU has the potential and responsibility to be in the forefront of this work,” said Hidvégi. “But we do think that the European Union should not stop at ethics guidelines … It can only come on top of legal compliance.” “We are skeptical of the approach being taken, the idea that by creating a golden standard for ethical AI it will confirm the EU’s place in global AI development,” Eline Chivot, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Data Innovation think tank, told The Verge. “To be a leader in ethical AI you first have to lead in AI itself.”
|
Ethical impacts from AI "unimaginable", says EU think tank
Several years in the making, the guidelines are the final version of proposals made in draft at the beginning of the year, which urged that AI be both human-centric and trustworthy. “it is important to build AI systems that are worthy of trust, since human beings will only be able to confidently and fully reap its benefits when the technology, including the processes and people behind the technology, are trustworthy.”
|
|
What the rest of the world doesn't know about Chinese AI
Excellent roundup of things about the Chinese AI scene that the rest of the world doesn’t know about, or harbors incorrect beliefs about. “Chinese people — including regular netizens, data protection officers, philosophy professors — care about AI-related ethics issues, including privacy… privacy is important to Chinese consumers, but it is absolutely dehumanizing to say Chinese people don’t care about privacy.”
|
|
Privacy’s Not an Abstraction
An experiment in privacy — and the discussion that ensued—offer unexpected lessons in who gets watched, and how. “Privacy for marginalized populations has never been, and will never be an abstract. Being surveilled, whether by private actors, or the state, is often the gateway to very tangible harms — violence in the form of police brutality, incarceration, or deportation. And there can be more subliminal, insidious impacts, too.”
|
|
UK businesses using artificial intelligence to monitor staff
The actions of 130,000 people in the UK and abroad are being monitored in real time by the Isaak system, which ranks staff members’ attributes. “It is part of what experts have labelled the “precision economy”, in which more and more aspects of life will be measured.”
|
Gerd on The Future of Work
|
|
Amazon Employees Try a New Form of Activism, as Shareholders
Amid a wave of petitions and walkouts among tech workers, Amazon employees are using their company-issued stock to pressure top executives into reducing contributions to climate change, in what may be an unprecedented effort to expand tech-worker unease into a new front of shareholder activism. Amazon’s Board does not think so: “Amazon’s board recommended voting against all of them in the proxy statement released Thursday.”
|
|
How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care
IBM encountered a fundamental mismatch between the way machines learn and the way doctors work. “Watson’s thinking is based on statistics, so all it can do is gather statistics about main outcomes, explains Kris. “But doctors don’t work that way.”
|
|
New York City wants to make sure that their AI applications and algorithms it uses aren’t biased. That’s harder than it sounds...
Algorithms help the government decide who gets arrested, where people go to school, and how to distribute social services. New York City created a task force to make sure these algorithms aren’t discriminating against its residents. That’s proving harder than it sounds. “The biggest roadblock: People on the task force don’t have a list of the systems they’re studying. Despite repeated requests, the group hasn’t been able to get hold of a list of all the types of automated decision-making technologies being used by city agencies.”
|
|
Researchers Want to Link Your Genes and Income—Should They?
A push to calculate a ‘genetic income score’ using giant DNA databases raises a raft of ethical questions. “Prospective employers could ask you to submit your genetic income score as part of a job application. Health and life insurers could use it to calculate your premiums. Social programs might use it as disqualifying criteria for receiving benefits.”
|
The Ethical Imperative for Technology
|
The Artificial Womb Moves Forward
Researchers at the University of Western Australia and Tohoku University Hospital are testing artificial wombs: plastic bags filled with synthetic amniotic fluid and connections for placenta-based life support. “Existing artificial incubators are already emotionally difficult to deal with for parents. Infants in bags of fluid may be even harder to accept.”
|
|
Another tax on the poor: Surrendering privacy for survival
This story is part of The Privacy Divide, a series that explores the fault lines and disparities–cultural, economic, philosophical–that have developed around digital privacy and its impact on society. “The harms for low-income people of a lack of data privacy are more concrete than for middle- and upper-income people,” says Gilman. “You become a target of predatory financial services, or on the other extreme you’re excluded from more desirable offerings.”
|
|
How will AI change your life? HR is next
AI Now Institute founders Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker explain everything you need to know on how AI changes many aspects of our life. “The next big thing in HR is gonna be even weirder… while you’re being interviewed, there’s a camera that’s recording you, and it’s recording all of your micro facial expressions and all of the gestures you’re using, the intonation of your voice, and then pattern matching those things that they can detect with their highest performers.”
|
|
Google, Facebook and other Big Tech companies need to play their position
Alphabet shutting down ethics council raises questions about corporate self-regulation, writes Ann Skeet. “Companies that are worming their way into all facets of our lives should remember this, whether they are deciding which products to produce or how best to support their employees. There might be some merit found in all of these considerations, but they are ill-advised. Each of these examples move companies further out of position and into the domain that elected legislators should fulfil.”
|
|
The pregnancy-tracking app Ovia lets women record their most sensitive data for themselves — and their boss
Pregnancy-tracking apps such as Ovia have climbed in popularity as fun, friendly companions for the daunting uncertainties of childbirth. But they have also become powerful monitoring tools for employers and health insurers. “This new generation of “menstrual surveillance” tools is pushing the limits of what women will share about one of the most sensitive moments of their lives. The apps, they say, are designed largely to benefit not the women but their employers and insurers, who gain a sweeping new benchmark on which to assess their workers as they consider the next steps for their families and careers.”
|
|
While America Dithers, Europe Gets Busy Crafting Artificial Intelligence Regulations
Part of our highlight story of the week: the European Commission is launching a pilot project to test draft ethical rules for artificial intelligence. “Self-regulation is not going to work. Do you think that voluntary taxation works? It doesn’t. Companies that follow ethical guidelines would be disadvantaged with respect to the companies that do not. It’s like driving. Whether it’s on the left or the right side, everybody needs to drive in the same way; otherwise, we’re in trouble.”
|
|
What Are the Values That Drive Decision Making by A.I.?
Given our obvious flaws, what can humans still do best? “The virtues of AI include its particular ability to share data to reach a universal view of things; its capacity to help exclude human bias; the speed and efficiency with which it operates. It can transcend human capacity in all these things. But these virtues must all be measured up against our other values. Without doing so, we might be entranced by the power of AI into allowing it to take the lead in determining how we think about some of our most important values and activities.”
|
|
Catch me if you can ;-) For Gerd's Public Calendar -> click the image
|
|
Gerd's Keynote at BuildingTheFuture Lisbon Jan 2019
|
Our latest podcast: The future humanity: Proaction versus Precaution
Precaution means looking proactively at what might happen—the possible consequences and unintended outcomes—before we proceed with a course of scientific exploration or technological development.
|
Technology vs Humanity: the coming clash of man and machine – Quotes from Gerd's book
“The key question isn’t whether or how technology can automate something, but how the outcome would feel for us humans, and whether automation would support human flourishing or not.”
|
|
|
|
Introducing Waymo Pet - a self-driving service for pets (April fools')
|
Robots | Michelob ULTRA Super Bowl 2019
|
|
That’s it for this week’s edition. We’ll be back on April 23, 2019. We are always interested in your opinion, so please feel free to ping us anytime with comments or feedback. Live long and prosper!
|
Did you enjoy this issue?
|
|
|
|
If you don't want these updates anymore, please unsubscribe here.
If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe here.
|
|
Zürich Switzerland www.futuristgerd.com
|