Worth reading.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/stephen-kotkin-putin-russia-ukraine-stalin
The Weakness of the Despot
… Earlier this week, I spoke with Kotkin about Putin, the invasion of Ukraine, the American and European response, and what comes next, including the possibility of a palace coup in Moscow. Our conversation, which appears in the video above, has been edited for length and clarity.
… You have an autocrat in power—or even now a despot—making decisions completely by himself. Does he get input from others? Perhaps. We don’t know what the inside looks like. Does he pay attention? We don’t know. Do they bring him information that he doesn’t want to hear? That seems unlikely. Does he think he knows better than everybody else? That seems highly likely. Does he believe his own propaganda or his own conspiratorial view of the world? That also seems likely. These are surmises. Very few people talk to Putin, either Russians on the inside or foreigners.
And so we think, but we don’t know, that he is not getting the full gamut of information. He’s getting what he wants to hear. In any case, he believes that he’s superior and smarter. This is the problem of despotism. It’s why despotism, or even just authoritarianism, is all-powerful and brittle at the same time. Despotism creates the circumstances of its own undermining. The information gets worse. The sycophants get greater in number. The corrective mechanisms become fewer. And the mistakes become much more consequential.
Beloved? But this article does point out one downside of globalization.
This beloved sandwich chain is still doing business in Russia
Prominent companies have announced that they're pulling out of Russia left and right thanks to its invasion of Ukraine, including big names such as Disney, Apple, and BP. But some stragglers remain.
Perhaps most notably, they include Subway, which has 446 restaurants in Russia, part of its substantial global footprint of about 40,000 locations.
Connecticut-based Subway said in a statement that its Russian restaurants are owned by local franchisees. "We don’t directly control these independent franchisees and their restaurants," the chain says. Instead, it has pledged to donate profits from Russian operations "to humanitarian efforts supporting Ukrainians who have been affected by the war."
Starbucks, with about 130 licensed locations in Russia and Ukraine, also does not directly operate its Russian shops, but is still suspending all business there. Burger King, with around 800 franchised Russian locations, and Yum! Brands, with 1,000 franchised KFC locations and a handful of Pizza Huts, have said they are stopping all corporate support for those restaurants. Like Subway, they will be donating profits to humanitarian organizations.
Under boycott pressure, McDonald's recently said it would shut down all of its 850 Russian stores, but they are corporate-owned, not franchised. Its stores in Russia and Ukraine generated 9% of its revenue in 2021, according to The Washington Post.
We have concluded that you are an idiot. We’re legally required to tell you that.
CCPA: Opinion of California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Deputy Attorney General Susan Duncan Lee
Opinion No. 20-303 March 10, 2022
A new opinion from the California Attorney General about the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018. has interesting implications:
THE HONORABLE KEVIN KILEY, ASSEMBLYMEMBER, has requested an opinion on a question of law arising under the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018.
QUESTION PRESENTED AND CONCLUSION
Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, does a consumer’s right to know the specific pieces of personal information that a business has collected about that consumer apply to internally generated inferences the business holds about the consumer from either internal or external information sources?
Yes, under the California Consumer Privacy Act, a consumer has the right to know internally generated inferences about that consumer, unless a business can demonstrate that a statutory exception to the Act applies.
What we do, not what we say we will do.
Everyday AI ethics: from the global to local through facial recognition
The focus of AI ethics, and flows of funding, have been concentrated at national or international levels. This contribution seeks to investigate the more banal or ‘everyday’ practice of AI ethics in local settings, ‘on the ground’. Through looking at one, controversial, application of AI in the form of facial recognition technology, through the lens of legal, policy and activist activities around this technology, including protest and social movement activities, bans and moratoriums on police use of facial recognition, and litigation – and with a focus on how this has played out in the UK - I will demonstrate how this grounded, localised, everyday approach is needed in order to understand practical implementations and contestations of AI ethics. I will also look at the flagship legislation on AI proposed in the EU, the draft AI Act and demonstrate that even when we have such transnational legislative initiatives, we must still look to local settings to understand how AI ethics are implemented and conceived.
Another approach to AI personhood?
http://nopr.niscair.res.in/handle/123456789/59280
Could an Artificial Intelligence be a Ghostwriter?
Advanced technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, have been pushing nowadays societies toward new ethical and legal challenges, including copyright law dilemmas. The contemporary development of innovative machines and cognitive technologies raises the need to rethink basic concepts such as ownership and accountability. In light of the rules of copyright law, this paper argues that innovative algorithms, such as GPT-3 (an autoregressive language model developed by Open AI to produce human-like text via deep learning), could be considered a modern form of ghostwriting brought forward by the Third Industrial Revolution, as defined by Jeremy Rifkin. The phenomenon of ghostwriting has been notorious since antiquity. Although ghost writing is also quite pervasive today, neither national nor international legal systems have yet fully regulated it. Based on the assumption that AI systems operate like ghostwriters in terms of their creativity, this paper asks whether AI’s creation should be subject to copyright regulations soon, and if so, to what extent.
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