Category: Artificial Intelligence, Data Science & Society
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NJ agrees No Internet voting in July, vague about November
A formal settlement agreement has been submitted to the NJ Superior Court regarding online ballot access in the 2020 elections. On May 4, 2020, New Jersey’s Division of Elections was caught trying to adopt vote-by-Internet on the stealth, even though the law forbids it. That is, not only is Internet voting inherently insecurable, there’s a…
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AI Ethics: Seven Traps
By Annette Zimmermann and Bendert Zevenbergen The question of how to ensure that technological innovation in machine learning and artificial intelligence leads to ethically desirable—or, more minimally, ethically defensible—impacts on society has generated much public debate in recent years. Most of these discussions have been accompanied by a strong sense of urgency: as more…
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Bridging Tech-Military AI Divides in an Era of Tech Ethics: Sharif Calfee at CITP
In a time when U.S. tech employees are organizing against corporate-military collaborations on AI, how can the ethics and incentives of military, corporate, and academic research be more closely aligned on AI and lethal autonomous weapons? Speaking today at CITP was Captain Sharif Calfee, a U.S. Naval Officer who serves as a surface warfare officer.…
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What Are Machine Learning Models Hiding?
Machine learning is eating the world. The abundance of training data has helped ML achieve amazing results for object recognition, natural language processing, predictive analytics, and all manner of other tasks. Much of this training data is very sensitive, including personal photos, search queries, location traces, and health-care records. In a recent series of papers,…
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Princeton Dialogues of AI and Ethics: Launching case studies
Summary: We are releasing four case studies on AI and ethics, as part of the Princeton Dialogues on AI and Ethics. The impacts of rapid developments in artificial intelligence (“AI”) on society—both real and not yet realized—raise deep and pressing questions about our philosophical ideals and institutional arrangements. AI is currently applied in a wide…
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Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Online Content Moderation
Yesterday in Berlin, I attended a workshop on the use of artificial intelligence in governing communication online, hosted by the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. Context In the United States and Europe, many platforms that host user content, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, have enjoyed safe harbor protections for the content they host,…
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The Rise of Artificial Intelligence: Brad Smith at Princeton University
What will artificial intelligence mean for society, jobs, and the economy? Speaking today at Princeton University is Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer of Microsoft. I was in the audience and live-blogged Brad’s talk. CITP director Ed Felten introduces Brad’s lecture by saying that the tech industry is at a crossroads. With the rise…
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Singularity Skepticism 4: The Value of Avoiding Errors
[This is the fourth in a series of posts. The other posts in the series are here: 1 2 3.] In the previous post, we did a deep dive into chess ratings, as an example of a system to measure a certain type of intelligence. One of the takeaways was that the process of numerically…
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Singularity Skepticism 3: How to Measure AI Performance
[This is the third post in a series. The other posts are here: 1 2 4] On Thursday I wrote about progress in computer chess, and how a graph of Elo rating (which I called the natural measure of playing skill) versus time showed remarkably consistent linear improvement over several decades. I used this to argue…
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Singularity Skepticism 2: Why Self-Improvement Isn’t Enough
[This is the second post in a series. The other posts are here: 1 3 4] Yesterday, I wrote about the AI Singularity, and why it won’t be a literal singularity, that is, why the growth rate won’t literally become infinite. So if the Singularity won’t be a literal singularity, what will it be? Recall that…