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.
https://www.wavy.com/news/local-news/williamsburg/testimony-by-hologram-instant-voice-to-text-trial-records-artificial-intelligence-reshaping-the-legal-system/
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)
https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-turing-transformation-artificial-intelligence-intelligence-augmentation-and-skill-premiums/
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.”
