Thread by @dw2

Today's @tortoise #TortoiseAISummit "AI in the Age of Pandemic" is about to begin. Six hours of sessions that all look highly relevant members.tortoisemedia.com/thinkin/the-to…

It includes this session from 15:00-15:45 BST: "Sovereignty & surveillance: In conversation with Shoshana Zuboff" #TortoiseAISummit members.tortoisemedia.com/thinkin/sovere…

This paper sets the scene for today's #TortoiseAISummit: "We’ve found AI is helping us understand and fight Covid-19 – but that it’s still got a way to go" members.tortoisemedia.com/2020/05/13/200…

"Double-digit rise in government trust in 6 of 11 markets measured" between Jan 2020 and late April 2020. From edelman.com/research/trust…. When fear rises, trust in government tends to rise - as mentioned during today's #TortoiseAISummit

"If stacking three crates of animal in the wrong order can bring the world to its knees, it's a clear sign of insufficient resilience, not just locally but also globally" - Paul Clarke, Ocado CTO at #TortoiseAISummit

The hard distinction made in #TortoiseAISummit between today's "narrow AI" and the potential eventual "general AI" of the future is a bit misleading. There are improvements in numerous fields of AI all the time. Each improvement ramps up both the opportunity and the risk of AI

The government that can use AI in the most effective way to spread highly convincing fake news that manipulates democratic decisions, will indeed be able to "win the race" and exert its power regardless of what other countries may wish to do - my comment for #TortoiseAISummit

Why worry about EU not having a major tech company?
1) lack of tax revenue (the big tech companies will become ever more profitable in a "winner takes all" world);
2) lack of real influence over the tech companies that will increasingly control public discussion #TortoiseAISummit

There are very few companies in the world that can manufacture world-leading semiconductor chips: TSMC in Taiwan, Samsung in Korea, and Intel in the US (who are, however, falling behind) - says Nigel Toon of Graphcore at #TortoiseAISummit

All crises accelerate trends. One trend that the current crisis will, sadly, accelerate, is the growing distrust and decoupling between the US and China. We should expect another cold war - John Sawers, former head of MI6, said at #TortoiseAISummit

Omar (didn't catch his name) points out that the world's largest semiconductor companies are dependent on two European suppliers: ARM (for the architectural design) and ASML, based in Holland, who supply manufacturing equipment used in fabs #TortoiseAISummit

The person getting the most praise and admiration in the chat in #TortoiseAISummit is Joanna Bryson - @j2bryson

Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein at #TortoiseAISummit highlights risks to vulnerable groups from contact-tracing. An example is the LGBT community in South Korea, who are fearful of their sexual orientation being "outed" in the wake of tracing Covid infections hrw.org/news/2020/05/1…

Just because something can be abused, it's no reason to avoid using it. E.g police forces sometimes abuse their power, but that doesn't mean we'd be better off without police. Same applies for data collection - Roger Taylor, Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation #TortoiseAISummit

My view: the trust we need, isn't trust in technology itself, but trust that the collective institutions of society will be able to oversee the ways in which the state uses that tech, and can intervene whenever the state abuses the tech or the data collected #TortoiseAISummit

On the subject of whether MPs and other public figures can be trusted (and referring to those MPs who carelessly or even wilfully share falsehoods on social media), how about a reliability index for politicians? #TortoiseAISummit transpolitica.org/2019/12/10/a-r…

On the #TortoiseAISummit question of the future evolution of trust/distrust in technology and big tech firms, if you like Black Mirror, check out the recent new series "Upload" available on Amazon Prime amazon.co.uk/Upload-Officia…

One sign of the times at #TortoiseAISummit: nearly four hours into the event, there's been hardly any mention of "Blockchain". Any similar event two years ago would have heard that word repeated regularly. That hype bubble seems to be burst now

Deprioritising attention to ethical issues when designing AI is like deprioritising attention to security, extensibility, or other aspects of quality in a project. It's much harder to retrofit these aspects at a later stage of the project #TortoiseAISummit

#TortoiseAISummit By the way, my views on the dangers of skimping on safety, testing, security, usability, etc, at the early stages of developing complex software, come from over two decades of observing large development projects, as reviewed in part in smartphonesandbeyond.com

It is not the strongest that survives. It is not the cleverest that survives. It is the most adaptable. Thomas Friedman starts his #TortoiseAISummit remarks with a reference to a core insight from evolution. But see quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/04/ada…

Friedman categorises three options for handling the Covid situation: China (lockdown; suppress the virus), Sweden (semi-lockdown till achieving natural herd immunity); the USA (people are tired of the lockdown, Fox News says it's OK to ignore health advice) #TortoiseAISummit

Related: in my own blog, I listed five options, "Five scenarios to unwind the lockdown. Are there more?" #TortoiseAISummit dw2blog.com/2020/05/12/fiv…

What we're seeing on the world stage today is that loud, obnoxious voices are super spreaders of cognitive viruses. Instead, the US is destroying the world's cognitive immunity. says Thomas Friedman at #TortoiseAISummit

For more on the compelling notion of "cognitive immunity" see this prescient article by Marina Gorbis from January, "To Protect Democracy We Need to Upgrade our Cognitive Immunity" #TortoiseAISummit medium.com/institute-for-…

Although what New Zealand has done can rightly be praised, the question remains what will happen when their lockdown is released. The example of Singapore is a reminder that management of the infection is necessarily a global problem - Thomas Friedman at #TortoiseAISummit

What the world is experiencing today is a 3rd great Promethean moment, after the Printing Press and the Industrial Revolution. It's been driven by big transformations in global Markets, Mother Nature (climate change), and Moore's Law - Thomas Friedman at #TortoiseAISummit

Friedman's phrase for what the world is now experiencing is "Fast, Fused, and Deep". He sees it as "a whole set of issues that require global governance, but there's no global government" #TortoiseAISummit

Another pithy phrase from Friedman at #TortoiseAISummit: watching existing regulators trying to steer fast-changing technologies is like watching dogs watching television

Friedman says he has been covering pandemics for several decades - a pandemic of radical fundamentalists, then one of financial contagion, and now one of a bio virus coupled with a collapse in cognitive immunity. The next great pandemic will be climate change #TortoiseAISummit

The tragedy of the USA is a combination of a President without shame, a Party without spine, and a Network (Fox News) without integrity. The most important step forwards is to unelect Donald Trump - Thomas Friedman at #TortoiseAISummit

The big unanswered question is how to obtain useful world governance given all the problems described by Friedman at #TortoiseAISummit. Friedman comments that the answer might, somehow, involve open source. Then he suggests we ask the next speaker, Shoshana Zuboff

James Harding of @tortoise starts the final #TortoiseAISummit interview by confessing "chair envy" of Shoshana Zuboff

My main takeaway from this final #TortoiseAISummit discussion: better oversight is likely the best answer to many of the concerns that have been expressed. We urgently need to revitalise the mechanisms of democratic oversight

... and I really like the concept of a "Digital Bretton Woods" #TortoiseAISummit project-syndicate.org/onpoint/digita…

For everyone who has dipped into this thread of my comments on #TortoiseAISummit, let me mention an event I'm hosting tomorrow, on a different kind of hacking, and on different kinds of scenarios for the future of humanity crowdcast.io/e/hacking-darw…