I approve of the Mad Magazine approach.
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/what-me-worry/
What, Me Worry?
Call me shortsighted, but I am not losing sleep over the prospect of a supercharged AI gaining consciousness and waging war on humans.
What does keep me up at night is that humans are already wielding the power of artificial intelligence to control, exploit, discriminate against, misinform, and manipulate other humans. Tools that can help us solve complex and vexing problems can also be put to work by cybercriminals or give authoritarian governments unprecedented power to spy on and direct the lives of their citizens. We can build models that lead to the development of new, more sustainable materials or important new drugs — and we can build models that embed biased decision-making into systems and processes and then grind individuals up in their gears.
In other words, AI already gives us plenty to worry about. We shouldn’t be distracted by dystopian fever dreams that misdirect our attention from present-day risk.
Confusing. Would friends and coworkers be next?
https://www.wired.com/story/anti-porn-covenant-eyes-bond-revoked/
An Anti-Porn App Put Him in Jail and His Family Under Surveillance
A court used an app called Covenant Eyes to surveil the family of a man released on bond. Now he’s back in jail, and tech misuse may be to blame.
… Hannah’s husband is now awaiting trial in jail, in part because of an anti-pornography app called Covenant Eyes. The company explicitly says the app is not meant for use in criminal proceedings, but the probation department in Indiana’s Monroe County has been using it for the past month to surveil not only Hannah’s husband but also the devices of everyone in their family. To protect their privacy, WIRED is not disclosing their surname or the names of individual family members. Hannah agreed to use her nickname.
Prosecutors in Monroe County this spring charged Hannah’s husband with possession of child sexual abuse material—a serious crime that she says he did not commit and to which he pleaded not guilty. Given the nature of the charges, the court ordered that he not have access to any electronic devices as a condition of his pretrial release from jail. To ensure he complied with those terms, the probation department installed Covenant Eyes on Hannah’s phone, as well as those of her two children and her mother-in-law.
In near real time, probation officers are being fed screenshots of everything Hannah’s family views on their devices. From images of YouTube videos watched by her 14-year-old daughter to online underwear purchases made by her 80-year-old mother-in-law, the family’s entire digital life is scrutinized by county authorities. “I’m afraid to even communicate with our lawyer,” Hannah says. “If I mention anything about our case, I’m worried they are going to see it and use it against us.”
Privacy? What’s that?
https://www.pogowasright.org/one-of-the-last-bastions-of-digital-privacy-is-under-threat/
One of the Last Bastions of Digital Privacy Is Under Threat
Julia Angwin has an OpEd on the NY Times. She writes, in part:
One of the last bastions of privacy are encrypted messaging programs such as Signal and WhatsApp. These apps, which employ a technology called end-to-end encryption, are designed so that even the app makers themselves cannot view their users’ messages. Texting on one of these apps — particularly if you use the “disappearing messages” feature — can be almost as private and ephemeral as most real-life conversations used to be.
However, governments are increasingly demanding that tech companies surveil encrypted messages in a new and dangerous way. For years, nations sought a master key to unlock encrypted content with a search warrant, but largely gave up because they couldn’t prove they could keep such a key safe from bad actors. Now they are seeking to force companies to monitor all their content, whether or not it is encrypted.
Read the full piece at The New York Times. Julia has gifted free access to this article.
Ready or not, someone (many someones?) will push to use these tools.
Testimony by hologram, instant voice-to-text trial records: Artificial intelligence reshaping the legal system
A recent demonstration at the William & Mary Law School shows how technology can transform the judicial system.
WAVY-TV watched two breakthrough technologies – one that’s already in place, another that will need to clear a constitutional hurdle.
Remote appearances in courtrooms have been going on for years, and usually it’s a defendant appearing by video from a nearby jail for an early-stage hearing. But new hologram technology from Los Angeles-based Proto takes it several steps further.
You might have seen it on NBC’s America’s Got Talent, or at a Brooklyn Nets or Dallas Cowboys game. In a courtroom context, it would enable a prosecution witness to testify from across the country or the other side of the world.
But enshrined in the Sixth Amendment is the confrontation clause, the notion that you get to confront your accuser – so is this encounter the same as face-to-face?
… Another state of the art technology for courtrooms displayed at William & Mary is called For the Record RealTime, the company’s latest iteration of voice-to-text recording of court proceedings that would eliminate or at least greatly reduce the need for human court reporters to document court proceedings.
Perspective. (And a bit of tech history I didn’t know)
The Turing Transformation: Artificial intelligence, intelligence augmentation, and skill premiums
Almon Brown Strowager, an American undertaker from the 19th century, allegedly angry that a local switch operator (and wife of a competing undertaker) was redirecting his customer calls to her husband, sought to take all switch operators to their employment graves. He conceived of and, with family members, invented the Strowager switch that automated the placement of phone calls in a network. The switch spread worldwide and, as a consequence, a job that once employed over 200,000 Americans has almost disappeared.
… It appears that Acemoglu and Brynjolfsson want to change the objectives and philosophy of the entire research field. The underlying hypothesis is that if the technical objectives of AI research are changed, then this will steer the economy away from potential loss of jobs, devaluation of skills, inequality, and social discord following from this. In this way, society can avoid what Brynjolfsson calls the “Turing Trap,” where AI-enabled automation leads to a concentration of wealth and power.
In this paper, we question this hypothesis. We ask whether it is really the case that the current technical objective of using human performance of tasks as a benchmark for AI performance will result in the negative outcomes described above. Instead, we argue that task automation, especially when driven by AI advances, can enhance job prospects and potentially widen the scope for employment of many workers. The neglected mechanism we highlight is the potential for changes in the skill premium where AI automation of tasks exogenously improves the value of the skills of many workers, expands the pool of available workers to perform other tasks, and, in the process, increases labor income and potentially reduces inequality. We label this possibility the “Turing Transformation.”
No comments:
Post a Comment