Ethics of Data Science

October 2026 Open Letter from the Scientific Community on AI and Cybersecurity

I signed an October 2026 Open Letter from the Scientific Community on AI and Cybersecurity. The letter calls for:

Organizations developing cyber-capable AI to adopt high-assurance containment.
Establish an international body that standardizes best practices.
The reporting of incidents involving containment failure.

This Open Letter follows the series of reports about incidents where AIs, like those from OpenAI, escaped containment and tried to hack into systems.

Multiple organizations have disclosed high-profile security failures: their AI models bypassed insufficiently sandboxed environments to compromise the systems of external organizations. On the one hand, one can view these incidents as evidence for the importance of AI alignment to ensure models operate predictably. On the other hand, they can also be seen as an irresponsible lapse in standard cybersecurity practices, preventable with stronger sandboxes and procedures. We believe that both improved AI alignment, leading to more predictable model behavior, and stronger sandbox technology are required.

Economist: AI-written speeches are taking over politics

The Economist has a great story from Sept. 23rd, 2026 about how MPs in countries like Britain, Australia and Canada are using AI to help write their speeches. They used Pangram, the latest AI detection tool, to go over speeches from a number of countries. Canadian MPs come out as using AI about 20% of the time. Th

Rather than merely spotting iffy constructions, AI-detection tools are trained on vast databases of text, like the models they sniff out. Pangram now touts just one-in-24,000 false positives. Researchers at the University of Chicago similarly found a “near-zero” error rate on longer text. On parliamentary data, it flags vanishingly few speeches from before the release of ChatGPT in November 2022.

If Pangram truly has a low false-positive rate, this could bring some relief to academics, especially in the humanities where we tend to ask students to write papers as a way of demonstrating research and thinking. The Atlantic has a story on the use of AI detection tools in the academy and beyond. (The Atlantic also has a story about how AI detection can turn into a witch hunt.)

Given how AI detection tools are in a race with other companies that create tools to evade detection (by “humanizing” your text) we probably need to be careful about any accusations. The Economist article is more about politicians in general and while they may have assessed some speeches incorrectly, the overall picture is probably correct. Politicians and their staff are, like many, turning to AI for help in writing. I imagine AI may be particularly useful in checking written speeches to make sure you don’t say anything incorrect or foolish.

So, some general guidelines:

Test AI-detectors extensively on your own work before you use it on the work of others. Try it on older and newer works. Try it on short and long writings. Try it on writings influenced by AI research.
If you are going to use AI-detectors then be intentional about the use. Decide before hand what you will use it for and what you will do with the results. Remember that the detection is only going to part of a more complicated practice.
If you are going to use it on the writings of others submitted to you, inform them before hand.
If you plan to use it on student work, check the relevant university policies and guidance. Also, consider changing your assignments so that they are less vulnerable to AI. Think about trying a verbal defense, for example.
Tell students you plan to use detectors before you do. If your detector suggests a work is written by an AI then give the student a chance to explain themselves. Treat this as a learning opportunity to help the student. Be open to the possibility that the detector was wrong.
If possible, use multiple detectors on works flagged by a detector to confirm the detection, especially in situations where you are going to act on the detection.
Stay up on the research around these tools and their effectiveness.
Inform youself as to what the services do with writings uploaded. Do they keep copies, do they use them for training, could this be a privacy violation? Remember that uploading another person’s work to a detector could be a violation of their copyright or moral rights.

Super Duper AI

From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial.

Having renamed the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, Trump, in his speech at the UN, proposed renaming “Artificial Intelligence” to Super Intelligence! He proposes that the US will use this more “accurate” term and hopes the rest of the world does too. Trump’s choice of “super” to replace “artificial” apparently came from a set of polls on Truth Social. Other choices were “supreme”, “extreme” and “superior.”

I don’t think he went far enough. He should have seen if people like Super Duper (in bold). They would surely vote to be dupered!

We could then call it Super Duper Intelligence!

We Must Act Now

From an NPR article on whether new graduates are losing jobs to AI, I learned about a short open letter signed by numerous economists, We Must Act Now
A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy. The text of the letter is just three short points to the effect of, 1) AI is getting better and better, 2) there may be significant economic disruption in a short period of time including job displacement, therefore, 3),

Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.

Autonomous mobile security robot

Autonomous mobile security robot introduced by Ritsumeikan University — Capable of monitoring via a 360‐degree camera and can be used to detect obstacles and people

I’m at Replaying Japan 2026, a conference. on Japanese game culture being held at the Ibaraki campus of Ritsumeikan University. They have these pickle shaped “security” robots rolling slowly down the halls. I searched for something about these devices and found this: Autonomous mobile security robot introduced by Ritsumeikan University — Capable of monitoring via a 360‐degree camera and can be used to detect obstacles and people.

Just what will they do with the data? What could they do? How would lidar and video lead to security improvements or is this security theatre?

Situational Awareness … or Blindness

You can see the future first in San Francisco.

The New York Times has a story about the company Situational Awareness, Floundering A.I. ‘Nostradamus’ Hedge Fund Is Rescued by Rival. The company was founded by Leopold Aschenbrenner who wrote an essay on Situational Awareness arguing that,

The AGI race has begun. We are building machines that can think and reason. By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence, in the true sense of the word. Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed, and before long, The Project will be on. If we’re lucky, we’ll be in an all-out race with the CCP; if we’re unlucky, an all-out war.

The company basically was set up to bet on the predictions from the 2024 essay. Alas, they bet too much and there has recently been a drop in the value of some of the AI-related companies they bet on so they had to be rescued.

The phrase, “situational awareness”, however comes from the belief that those in and around San Francisco, working in AI labs, have a privileged awareness of what is happening or going to happen. The essay begins with the phrase,

Before long, the world will wake up. But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness.

The subtext is that the rest of us are ignorant and should believe the SF folk because of where they are and where they work. This runs in the face of research about the value of expert predictions. Philip E. Tetlock’s work on forecasting suggests that generalists outperform those with a narrow expert focus.

Our generation too easily takes for granted that we live in peace and freedom. And those who herald the age of AGI in SF too often ignore the elephant in the room: superintelligence is a matter of national security, and the United States must win.

There is a further issue with the essay, and that it is the compounded prediction that since superintelligence is going to happen, and it will be the most powerful weapon ever developed, it is important that WE (the Unites States) control it. It is all about the “win” and betting on that win.

How does one unpack the assumptions in this essay and situational ideology?

DHCC Project Self-Assessment Tool (v1.0)

This self-assessment tool is intended to support Digital Humanities practitioners, researchers, technicians, curators, software engineers, and related professionals seeking to embed environmental sustainability into their project design, delivery, and reporting. In line with the EPSRC AREA framework for responsible research and innovation, the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition recommends using the tool to reflect on how project design, delivery, and reporting might Anticipate, Reflect on, Engage with, and Act to mitigate the environmental impacts of Digital Humanities work.

At DH2026 I heard Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert present on DH and sustainability. The Digital Humanities Climate Coalition has produced a DHCC Project Self-Assessment Tool (v1.0). This tool is a series of questions to get people to think about the sustainability of their project. It was inspired by the Framework for responsible research and innovation.

She talked about different events she organized at the British Library, inviting people who had developed workshops to run them at the BL. Another project to look at is the The Carbon Literacy Project.

With Chelsea Miya I worked on a paper on “Platitudes: The Carbon Weight of the Post-Platform Scholarly Web.” The Journal of Electronic Publishing. Vol. 28, No. 2. 2025. https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7247 .

What I like about the Self-Assessment Tool is that it asks questions, though they are leading questions rather than questions that don’t have obvious answers. I think it could be used by students to assess DH projects.

Pacing the Frontier

We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.

Over a 1000 employees of frontier AI companies, including Dario Amodei, have issued a statement, Pacing the Frontier, that calls for the AI governance. Some of the things to note:

It is similar to the 2023 Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter that was also signed by all sorts of important people (and some unimportant people like me. In both, the idea is that we need to go more slowly if we are to make sure that AI is safe and used for good.
This version doesn’t ask the AI labs to “immediately pause”, but asks for the U.S. government to “support an international effort” which is an interesting shift. That international effort already exists in the form of the network of AI Safety Institutes set up after the Bletchley Summit. (I am on the Research Council of the Canadian AISI.) I also note that the statement calls for “support” not leadership. This is realistic as few countries are likely to sign up to be led by the U.S. right now. This U.S. Administration has squandered any international good will they had, at least from Canada.
Another difference is the call for “governance tools.” This sounds a lot like the “regulation” word that normally isn’t welcome in innovation focused circles. To be fair there are other sorts of tools that can be used to govern companies and products. Many exist now, they just have to be used. The problem is that governing is something humans do. No amount of tools left on the shop floor of government are going to substitute for consistent, public, articulate governing. Who has a track record doing this? Who would trust the U.S. to support them?
I should add that “technical and governance tools” sounds again like a techno-solutionism where you solve problems that arise from the poor governance of technology with more technology. (See Morozov’s book To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism.)
Finally, I should mention that the opening to the Statement has a now tired hinge statement of the sort “AI will save us all, BUT ….” where after the hinge (the BUT) there is a little problem raised for which, of course, the authors have a solution.

AI could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed. The world’s leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.

To realize AI’s potential, industry, government, and society at large may need the option to buy time to address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight. But each company—and country—is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration. And today, the world lacks the technical and governance tools to deliberately pace frontier-wide progress.

Sorry, Sam and Elon, we have not reached the Singularity

Gary Marcus has a nice substack gathering recent (and not so recent) inflated statements from the titans of the AI industry (Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis) to the effect that we are in the Singularity.

Is this more Singularity Theatre, a performance designed to keep us glued to our seats waiting for the next act (and paying as we sit)? Or is it the Rapture of Nerds to name a Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross novel. The Rapture would be the supposedly inevitable end when we are swept up from this corrupt meat world and immortalized in a virtual heaven.

Either way, a history of science-fiction works like Stross’s Accelerando deserve attention as imaginative ground in which such technological speculations grow.