I volunteered for the first squirrel census in the city. Here’s what I learned, in a nutshell.
From Lauren Klein on Twitter I learned about a great New York Times article on There are 2,373 squirrels in Central Park. I know because I helped count them. The article is by Denise Lau (Jan. 8, 2020.) As Klein points out, it is about the messiness of data collection. (Note that she has a book coming out on Data Feminism with Catherine D’Ignazio.)
But talk is just that—it’s not enough. For all the lip service paid to these issues, many organizations’ AI ethics guidelines remain vague and hard to implement.
Thanks to Oliver I came across this call for an end to ethics-washing by artificial intelligence reporter Karen Hao in the MIT Technology Review, In 2020, let’s stop AI ethics-washing and actually do something The call echoes something I’ve been talking about – that we need to move beyond guidelines, lists of principles, and checklists. She nicely talks about some of the initiatives to hold AI accountable that are taking place and what should happen. Read on if you want to see what I think we need.
With the end of the year there are some great articles showing up reflecting on debacles of the decade. One of my favorites is The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade. Ed-Tech is one of those fields where over and over techies think they know better. Some of the debacles Watters discusses:
This collection of 100 terrible ideas in instructional technology should be mandatory reading for all of us who have been keen on ed-tech. (And I am one who has develop ed-tech and oversold it.) Each item is a mini essay with links worth following.
ParityBOT is a chatbot developed here in Edmonton that tweets positive things about women in politics in response to hateful tweets. It send empowering messages.
You can read about it in a CBC story, Engineered-in-Edmonton Twitter bot combats misogyny on the campaign trail.
The bot follows all women candidates in the election and uses some sort of AI or sentiment detection to identify nasty tweets aimed at them and then responds with a positive message from a collection crowdsources from the public. What isn’t clear is if the positive message is sent to the offending tweeter or just posted generally?
ParityBOT was developed by ParityYEG which is a collaboration between the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute and scientist Kory Mathewson.
On the Humanist discussion list John Keating recommended the short video Slaughterbots that presents a plausible scenario where autonomous drones are used to target dissent using social media data. Watch it! It is well done and presents real issues in a credible short video.
While the short is really about autonomous weapons and the need to ban them, I note that one of ideas included is that dissent could be silenced by using social media to target people. The scenario imagines that university students who shared a dissenting video on social media have their data harvested (including images of their faces) and the drones target them using face recognition. Science fiction, but suggestive of how social media presence can be used for control.
This weekend I was at the Linked Infrastructure For Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) Team Meeting 2019. The meeting/retreat was in Banff at the Banff International Research Station and I kept my research notes at philosophi.ca.
The goal of Lincs is to create a shared linked data store that humanities projects can draw on and contribute to. This would let us link our digital resources in ways that create new intellectual connections and that allow us to reason about linked data.
“every move you make…, every word you say, every game you play…, I’ll be watching you.” (The Police – Every Breath You Take)
Education Week has an alarming story about how schools are using surveillance, Schools Are Deploying Massive Digital Surveillance Systems. The Results Are Alarming. The story is by Benjamin Harold and dates from May 30, 2019. It talks not only about the deployment of cameras, but the use of companies like Social Sentinel, Securly, and Gaggle that monitor social media or school computers.
Every day, Gaggle monitors the digital content created by nearly 5 million U.S. K-12 students. That includes all their files, messages, and class assignments created and stored using school-issued devices and accounts.
The company’s machine-learning algorithms automatically scan all that information, looking for keywords and other clues that might indicate something bad is about to happen. Human employees at Gaggle review the most serious alerts before deciding whether to notify school district officials responsible for some combination of safety, technology, and student services. Typically, those administrators then decide on a case-by-case basis whether to inform principals or other building-level staff members.
The story provides details that run from the serious to the absurd. It mentions concerns by the ACLU that such surveillance can desensitize children to surveillance and make it normal. The ACLU story makes a connection with laws that forbid federal agencies from studying or sharing data that could make the case for gun control. This creates a situation where the obvious ways to stop gun violence in schools aren’t studied so surveillance companies step in with solutions.
Needless to say, surveillance has its own potential harms beyond desensitization. The ACLU story lists the following potential harms:
As with the massive investment in surveillance for national security and counter terrorism purposes, we need to ask whether the cost of these systems, both financial and other, is worth it. Unfortunately, protecting children, like protecting from terrorism is hard to put a price on which makes it hard to argue against such investments.
At the SpokenWeb symposium at SFI I learned about a web site RightsStatements.org. This site provides example rights statements to use and put on the web. For example In Copyright – Rights-Holder(s) Unlocatable or Unidentifiable. These often use American language rather than Canadian language, but they are a useful resource.
Another, better known source for rights statement is Creative Commons, but it is more for creators than for cultural heritage online.
After a month or so of being subscribed to Apple News+, today I dropped the subscription. It was one more subscription, and they add up. More importantly, it wasn’t giving me the news. When Notre Dame was burning Apple News+ was feeding me inane lifestyle stories. It didn’t seem to be able to gather and present current news, just glossy magazine articles. Perhaps it wasn’t meant to compete with Google News. Perhaps I wasn’t meant to pay for it.
Last week we held a conference on AI, Ethics and Society at the University of Alberta. As I often do, I kept conference notes at: philosophi.ca : AI Ethics And Society.
The conference was opened by Reuben Quinn whose grandfather signed Treaty 6. He challenged us to think about what labels and labelling mean. Later Kim Tallbear challenged us to think about how we want the encounter with other intelligences to go. We don’t have a good track record of encountering the other and respecting intelligence. Now is the time to think about our positionality and to develop protocols for encounters. We should also be open to different forms of intelligence, not just ours.
