Not sure I could easily resume an all cash life. How ‘cashless’ is Russia?

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60637429

Visa and Mastercard suspend Russian operations

Visa and Mastercard have announced they will suspend all operations in Russia in protest at its invasion of Ukraine.

Cards issued by Russian banks will no longer be supported by their networks, the payments giants said on Saturday.

Both firms have also said that cards issued abroad will no longer work at businesses or ATMs in Russia.

Like an autonomous AI weapon in judicial robes?

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4038816

When Machines Can Be Judge, Jury, and Executioner (Book Review)

There is much in Katherine Forrest’s claim—and thus in her new book—that is accurate and pressing. Forrest adds her voice to the many who have critiqued contemporary algorithmic criminal justice, and her seven years as a federal judge and decades of other experience make her perspective an important one Many of her claims find support in kindred writings, such as her call for greater transparency, especially when private companies try to hide algorithmic details for reasons of greater profit. A for-profit motive is a fine thing in a private company, but it is anathema to our ideals of public trial. Algorithms are playing an increasingly dominant role in criminal justice, including in our systems of pretrial detention and sentencing. And as we criminal justice scholars routinely argue, there is much that is rather deeply wrong in that criminal justice.

Refine your definition…

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-022-00143-x

Defining organizational AI governance

Artificial intelligence (AI) governance is required to reap the benefits and manage the risks brought by AI systems. This means that ethical principles, such as fairness, need to be translated into practicable AI governance processes. A concise AI governance definition would allow researchers and practitioners to identify the constituent parts of the complex problem of translating AI ethics into practice. However, there have been few efforts to define AI governance thus far. To bridge this gap, this paper defines AI governance at the organizational level. Moreover, we delineate how AI governance enters into a governance landscape with numerous governance areas, such as corporate governance, information technology (IT) governance, and data governance. Therefore, we position AI governance as part of an organization’s governance structure in relation to these existing governance areas. Our definition and positioning of organizational AI governance paves the way for crafting AI governance frameworks and offers a stepping stone on the pathway toward governed AI.

Yeah, but we do it anyway...

https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3516423

ACM, ethics, and corporate behavior

Everyone in computing is promoting ethics these days. The Vatican has issued the Rome Call for AI Ethics, which has been endorsed by many organizations, including tech companies. Facebook (now Meta) has donated millions of U.S. dollars to establish a new Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence at the Technical University of Munich, since "ensuring the responsible and thoughtful use of AI is foundational to everything we do."a Google announced it "is committed to making progress in the responsible development of AI."b And last, but not least, ACM now requires nominators and endorsers of ACM award candidates attest that "To the best of my knowledge, the candidate … has not committed any action that violates the ACM Code of Ethics and ACM's Core Values."

But AI technology is the fundamental technology that underlies "Surveillance Capitalism," defined as an economic system centered on the commodification of personal data with the core purpose of profit-making. Under the mantra of "Information wants to be free," several tech companies have turned themselves into advertising companies.

… Surveillance capitalism is perfectly legal, and enormously profitable, but it is unethical, many people believe,d including me. After all, the ACM Code of Professional Ethicse starts with "Computing professionals' actions change the world. To act responsibly, they should reflect upon the wider impacts of their work, consistently supporting the public good." It would be extremely difficult to argue that surveillance capitalism supports the public good.

Parents don’t count in Texas?

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4047213

Children’s Digital Privacy and the Case Against Parental Consent

Children’s engagement with the internet has exploded. From education to social media, companies have offered products and services that --far from being mere distractions for children -- have increasingly become necessities. This necessity is most keenly felt in the EdTech world. As companies rely on the verifiable parental consent required by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA”) to collect and use minors’ data, reviewing boilerplate waivers of liability and consent forms for children’s online activities have thus become part of parenting. This article argues that under the common law tradition of protecting the best interest of the child, when it comes to protecting children’s digital privacy, relying solely on parental consent is insufficient and ill-suited.

Start ‘em young! (Is high school too late?)

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3478432.3499073

A Novel Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Course for Secondary School Students

We present an overview of a "Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence" course that is part of a large online course platform for upper second level students. We take a novel approach to teaching fundamental AI concepts that does not require code, and assumes little prior knowledge including only basic mathematics. The design ethos is for students to gain an understanding of how algorithms can "learn".