Where should tech builders draw the line on AI for military or surveillance? Just because it can be built, doesn’t mean it should be. At what point do we blow the whistle, call out the boss, and tell the world? In this episode, find out what it’s like to sound the alarm from inside a big tech company, and more. Source: The Internet Health Report 2022 — AI in Real Life
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by Felicity Lawrence
Uber paid academics six-figure sums for research to feed to the media | Uber | The Guardian
Uber paid high-profile academics in Europe and the US hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce reports that could be used as part of the company’s lobbying campaign. The Uber files, a cache of thousands of confidential documents leaked to the Guardian, reveal lucrative deals with several leading academics who were paid to publish research on the benefits of its economic model. The reports were commissioned as Uber wrestled with regulators in key cities around the world. University economists were targeted in France and Germany where enforcement by the authorities was increasingly fierce in 2014-15. One report by a French academic, who asked for a €100,000 consultancy fee, was cited in a 2016 Financial Times report as evidence that Uber was a “route out of the French banlieues”, delighting Uber executives. [...] Source: Uber paid academics six-figure sums for research to feed to the media | Uber | The Guardian
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by Harry Davies, Simon Goodley, Felicity Lawrence, Paul Lewis, and Lisa O'Carroll
Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals | Uber | The Guardian
A leaked trove of confidential files has revealed the inside story of how the tech giant Uber flouted laws, duped police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments during its aggressive global expansion. The unprecedented leak to the Guardian of more than 124,000 documents – known as the Uber files – lays bare the ethically questionable practices that fuelled the company’s transformation into one of Silicon Valley’s most famous exports. The leak spans a five-year period when Uber was run by its co-founder Travis Kalanick, who tried to force the cab-hailing service into cities around the world, even if that meant breaching laws and taxi regulations. During the fierce global backlash, the data shows how Uber tried to shore up support by discreetly courting prime ministers, presidents, billionaires, oligarchs and media barons. [...] Source: Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals | Uber | The Guardian
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by Nikki Rojas
Teaching algorithms about skin tones | Harvard Gazette
When Ellis Monk’s wife became pregnant in 2019, the couple became curious about what skin tone their child might have. The subject was of more than passing interest to the sociology professor, some of whose work involves the role lighter and darker skin tones play in society. Monk’s wife noted that a comprehensive scale would be useful and urged him to develop one. So he did, and last month Google adopted Monk’s namesake 10-shade scale as a standard in its digital products to make them more inclusive and diverse and to promote wider awareness of the problems and unintended bias associated with technologies that fail to recognize a wider range of skin tones. Monk’s scale is already making an impact. It has been incorporated in Google’s online image searches and photo filters. The innovation will be particularly important for training artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, such as facial recognition and self-driving vehicle systems, which often have not performed as well with people with darker skin tones. And it could help reduce or eliminate some unintended algorithm bias in search engines and other products. [...] Source: Teaching algorithms about skin tones – Harvard Gazette
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by Ashley Lee
Hybrid activism under the radar: Surveillance and resistance among marginalized youth activists in the United States and Canada | New Media & Society
Social media and digital platforms have become essential tools for the new generation of youth activists. However, these tools subject youth to both new (and old) forms of surveillance and control. Drawing on in-depth interviews and social media walkthroughs with 61 youth activists, I examine hybrid tactics that these youth employ to resist surveillance and other forms of digitally mediated control as they participate in politics and social movements. I show that even in democracies like the United States and Canada, for individuals along intersecting axes of marginalization (e.g. race, gender), public political acts do not capture the full range of young people’s political repertoires. Young people, especially those from marginalized groups, adopt hidden, under-the-radar tactics in response to pressures of social, state, and corporate surveillance. I develop the concept of “digital infrapolitics” referring to the ways in which digital politics and activism go below the radar under surveillance and control. Source: Hybrid activism under the radar: Surveillance and resistance among marginalized youth activists in the United States and Canada – Ashley Lee, 2022
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by Melissa Heikkilä
Why business is booming for military AI startups | MIT Technology Review
Militaries are responding to the call. NATO announced on June 30 that it is creating a $1 billion innovation fund that will invest in early-stage startups and venture capital funds developing “priority” technologies such as artificial intelligence, big-data processing, and automation. Since the war started, the UK has launched a new AI strategy specifically for defense, and the Germans have earmarked just under half a billion for research and artificial intelligence within a $100 billion cash injection to the military. “War is a catalyst for change,” says Kenneth Payne, who leads defense studies research at King’s College London and is the author of the book I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict. The war in Ukraine has added urgency to the drive to push more AI tools onto the battlefield. Those with the most to gain are startups such as Palantir, which are hoping to cash in as militaries race to update their arsenals with the latest technologies. But long-standing ethical concerns over the use of AI in warfare have become more urgent as the technology becomes more and more advanced, while the prospect of restrictions and regulations governing its use looks as remote as ever. [...] Source: Why business is booming for military AI startups | MIT Technology Review
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by Tara L. Conley
Encoded Subjectivities: Interpreting Blackness and Representations of Black Women on inDmix.com | Social Media + Society
The study of Black digital and Internet cultures is a burgeoning site of inquiry. While prior research on identity and the Internet does well to address racialized experiences online, further exploration into so-called niche or under-the-radar Black digital spaces is necessary for a more comprehensive documentation of early Internet applications, practices, and digitally mediated sociality during the early 20th century. This article centers Black southern Internet culture by examining the website, InDmix.com, a photo-based asynchronous web media platform, and one of the first Inrnet visual catalogs of southern Black college nightlife of the aughts. Combining scholarly inquiry with first-person storytelling, this article provides historical references to contextualize an aspect of early Black Internet culture while arguing that Black women, in particular, mediate the process of visibility and valuation since they carry conceptions of beauty and Blackness across the platform. Engaging with concepts of architectural Blackness and informational Blackness, this article demonstrates the ways in which southern Black youth culture combined with early Web 2.0 technology practices provides a digital snapshot of college and urban nightlife experiences along the backdrop of socioeconomic and cultural shifts in the Gulf Coast region of the United States. In the spirit of documenting Black digital cultures, this article concludes with a conversation with founder Ikem Onyekwena, the Phi Beta Sigma photographer and tech entrepreneur who founded InDmix.com in 2004. Source: Encoded Subjectivities: Interpreting Blackness and Representations of Black Women on inDmix.com – Tara L. Conley, 2022
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by Terri Park
Exploring emerging topics in artificial intelligence policy | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Members of the public sector, private sector, and academia convened for the second AI Policy Forum Symposium last month to explore critical directions and questions posed by artificial intelligence in our economies and societies. The virtual event, hosted by the AI Policy Forum (AIPF) — an undertaking by the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing to bridge high-level principles of AI policy with the practices and trade-offs of governing — brought together an array of distinguished panelists to delve into four cross-cutting topics: law, auditing, health care, and mobility. In the last year there have been substantial changes in the regulatory and policy landscape around AI in several countries — most notably in Europe with the development of the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act, the first attempt by a major regulator to propose a law on artificial intelligence. In the United States, the National AI Initiative Act of 2020, which became law in January 2021, is providing a coordinated program across federal government to accelerate AI research and application for economic prosperity and security gains. Finally, China recently advanced several new regulations of its own. [...] Source: Exploring emerging topics in artificial intelligence policy | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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by Colin Lecher
Police Are Looking to Algorithms to Predict Domestic Violence | The Markup
Police Are Looking to Algorithms to Predict Domestic Violence Domestic abuse is a widespread problem in the United States and around the world. Violence at the hands of an intimate partner has affected more than 600 million women globally, according to World Health Organization estimates, and the problem has only grown during the pandemic. Law enforcement officers have turned to various tools, from simple questionnaires to algorithms, as a way to prioritize the highest-risk crimes. While some research has recognized the potential benefits of the tools, it has also left experts in the domestic violence community with questions about the ethics and efficacy of relying on technology to predict future violent acts. Matthew Bland, an associate professor in evidence based policing at the University of Cambridge, said there is broad acknowledgment that something needs to be done to improve services for domestic violence victims, but that how, or whether, to use technology as a solution is up for debate. [...] Source: Police Are Looking to Algorithms to Predict Domestic Violence – The Markup
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by Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio
Meet SmartLINK, the App Tracking Nearly a Quarter Million Immigrants | The Markup
For many people, an app malfunctioning is scarcely more than an annoyance. But for a Honduran immigrant living in Pennsylvania, a recent glitch elicited fears about the worst-case scenario: that it could hurt her chances of staying in America. As her case works its way through immigration court, the woman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of negative consequences for speaking with the media, has been required by immigration officials to check in weekly on a smartphone app owned by a subsidiary of the massive private-prison company GEO Group. When she opened it up to diligently take and send a selfie on the designated day, the picture wouldn’t deliver. The app was malfunctioning. And she was terrified. “That whole day, you can’t imagine how I was feeling,” she said in Spanish. She worried officials would incorrectly assume she was dodging them. “If they come knocking on the door, what will I say, what will I do?” [...] Source: Meet SmartLINK, the App Tracking Nearly a Quarter Million Immigrants – The Markup