SedaG Profile picture
Apr 9, 2020 10 tweets 2 min read Read on X
"Palantir are completely aware that they’re creepy by design – their logistics platform is world class, though it’s more often used to move people closer to death than further away – and Facebook have the same naive arrogance in 2020 that they had in 2015"
"And, in the bigger picture, we must ask: would we do this for HIV? For whatever we do for COVID will be copied by others – first for COVID, and then by others for other conditions."
"Do we want to become one of those countries that takes blood samples as people try to pass through customs?"
"When there are perverse economic incentives around testing, one person with known immunity might take the test in place of others – and others may feel compelled to expose themselves for the chance to feed their kids, or return to a ‘normal life’."
"Any mass testing infrastructure will rely not only upon the accuracy of the test itself, but upon there not being harm(s) for one type of outcome compared with another. "
"And any centralised list of confirmed test results will, by definition, be a list of the entire population and their digital devices. A National Identity Register in all but name. "
"The country will go back to (a new) normal. Do we really want abusive employers or others to be checking antigen and antibody status for employment in Wetherspoons, or at an Amazon warehouse – or so you can pick your own kids up from the school gate? "
"How do we treat someone who gets off a plane from anywhere – whether from China (with their choices), Trumpistan (with their inaction), NYC (with their resources), or Africa (with their resources)? What is the goal of “immunity certificates”? And how will that work at Heathrow?"
"The Home Office will, of course, default to racism and prejudice; fingerprinting arrivals because its Ministers and officials have long wanted to (it went badly). Actions and cultures predicated on secrecy rarely prove effective."
"Announcing an app at PM’s daily press conference might (hopefully) achieve adoption. The app might even do what it’s supposed to. But making that announcement in a way which doesn’t undermine even more vital public health messaging would need a degree of demonstrated competence"

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More from @sedyst

Mar 15, 2021
One year into the pandemic, in Germany we are encountering debate around apps (see #LucaApp or #ImmunityPassports) that promise to solve the Corona crisis. The current debate forgets important questions for public interest 1/x
Currently the debate is all about "data privacy". But, is that all that is at stake?
Are there other questions that journalists, politicians and civil society could be asking that could ensure these apps serve the public interest? 2/x
Serving the public interest does not begin and end with good data security and privacy but needs to start with whether the apps serve the purpose they are designed for and do so effectively. 3/x
Read 17 tweets
Mar 15, 2021
Ein Jahr nach Beginn der Pandemie erleben wir in Deutschland eine extrem verflachte Debatte über Apps (z.B. #LucaApp oder #ImmunityPassports), die bei der Bekämpfung der Corona-Krise helfen sollen. Problem: Diese Form der Debatte ist nicht hilfreich.
Aktuell konzentiert sich die Debatte auf "Datensicherheit".
Aber ist das die einzige relevante Frage?
Was sind die Fragen, die Journalist*innen, Politiker*Innen und die Zivilgesellschaft stellen sollten, wenn es darum geht, das Gemeinwohl nicht aus dem Blick zu verlieren?
Ob etwas dem Gemeinwohl zuträglich ist, hängt nicht nur von guter Datensicherheit ab, sondern muss sich zuerst mit der Frage beschäftigen, ob diese Apps tatsächlich dem Zweck dienen, zu dem sie eingesetzt werden.
Read 19 tweets
Oct 24, 2020
"part of what we in an American university have to consider now, what it is for us to have been made custodians of those principles [of free speech] even as we are made to watch when they are dissolved in an infernal public private partnership." Fred Moten
"it is that this ought not to drive us to defend an abstract principle of free speech, which is only ever concretized, and usually at the same moment dishonestly and disgustingly sacralized, in exclusion."
"instead and in refusal of that, lets claim and eruptively assert our fugitive speech, which is fueled by the realization of the conditions we live in"
Read 5 tweets
Oct 4, 2020
For those interested in the political economy of AI this report has a lot of teasers. Many of them are aligned with some recent papers that talked about the concentration of research in the hands of a few (corporations and their research collaborators).
Report claims OpenAI and Deepmind, but also other big players in the industry are important players in research but do not/cannot publish their code (I hope all our colleagues who now do ethics at these companies consider these structural issues!)
Tools are an important but of expanding infrastructural power of these companies into research institutions, and the report claims Facebook is outpacing Google.
Read 10 tweets
Aug 25, 2020
When Alex Irpan of Google writes about compute as the way forward for AI, you wonder how much of this is AI pulling on compute vs. compute (and the investment into chips) pulling on AI.
The whole article is as much about economics as about AI, in fact it conflates the two 1/x
It starts with artificial general intelligence being equated with "economically valuable work":

"artificial general intelligence (AGI) [is] an AI system that matches or exceeds humans at almost all (95%+) economically valuable work

2/x
According to Irpan, economics determines also how AI will spread:
"We also don’t have to build AI systems that learn like humans do. If they’re capable of doing most human-level tasks, economics is going to do the rest, whether or not those systems are made in our own image."
3/x
Read 7 tweets
May 22, 2020
This WP article has highlighted important problems with Gapple's contact tracing efforts & quotes some of my mentors in tech policy. But, from my vantage point, it creates (unintentionally) a false dichotomy between national sovereignty and Gapple (1/x)
washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
My gut response to the first Gapple announcement was not only lack of sovereignty but also democratic process. Sovereignty is not sufficient give the complexity of the relationship between governments & Gapple (2/x)

radicalai.org/e5-seda-gurses
To this day most app initiatives are techno-centric and top down and have side-stepped health authorities as well as civil society. Governments across Europe got pushback for this, and some changed course, e.g., Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. (3/x)
Read 15 tweets

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