Oh, the leaked EU "AI" regulation is already starting out interesting.
(As with privacy/data protection the idea of regulating "manipulating behavior" is super problematic and a bad approach.)
This is basically all "AI" systems operated by someone in business. That is Amazon's product recommendation.
But at least you have to be specific with whom you put under "AI" surveillance /s
But it's cool that the current trend of European sinophobia goes so far that the EU adds regulation against "chinese style social scoring" that doesn't exist in that way in China. /s
Sorry, don't have the time to go through it in detail right now. Gotta get some work done :(
But it will be fascinating to see how companies will do exactly the outlined things and just avoid calling their actions "AI" but use "data science" or "big data" as terms and run with it.
This one is also fun: Can you ensure that your data set has neither intentional nor unintentional biases that may become basis for discrimination? I get what the intention is but if we could do that, we'd already do it.
(That thing feels very much like a warmed up GDPR)
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Die Ausschreibung für die Nationale Bildungsplattform (wir erinnern uns: Insgesamt 630 Mio EUR sollen da ausgegeben werden) ist raus.
Und es ist sehr LOL.
(Die Leistungsbeschreibung sind 27 Seiten, in denen vor allem Vorgehensblabla [mit SCRUM natürlich!] steht. Also es gibt quasi nichts belastbares bisher. Developmentmethode Fuck Around And Find Out.
(Aber man will das jetzt dann doch irgenwie für 35 Mio bauen. Dabei wird jede Einzelkomponente gesondert vergeben an unterschiedliche Partner. Das wird alles sehr viel Smoother machen)
The Bitcoin/Crypto crowd has shifted narratives a few times. The current trend is to claim to want to support poor people in the global south or in areas in crisis ("banking the unbanked" etc). This narrative is based on really shoddy arguments and data.
They keep pointing to El Salvador who made it legal tender. Yesterday again crypto people argued that this was important so El Salvadorians can protect their assets against inflation. What's the other legal tender in El Salvador? The fucking US Dollar.
There are also a whole bunch of anecdotes about individuals from Ukraine who had crypto and of course still have them after having fled the country or about experiments in paying women in Afghanistan in crypto so their assets wouldn't be taken by their male familiy members.
Good. And to those complaining about this decision:
There is no neutral search engine, they all have opinions and biases. DuckDuckGo made this one transparent. That's about as good as it gets. You can disagree with the decision (I don't) but the fact that they decide is fine.
Seriously. No Algorithm working within social contexts is ever "neutral", that is just a flawed goal. Algorithms are designed and implemented and configured based on the goals of the people running them. A system that claims "neutrality" often just hides their politics.
(This is a basic flaw of a lot of the "bias in tech" discourse because some people seem to believe that you can fundamentally de-bias tech. You cannot. You can only understand bias and make it explicit. Which is often super uncomfortable.)
Der Bundestag hat ja diverse wissenschaftliche Unterstützungsorganisationen, die den Abgeordneten zentrale Informationen möglichst objektiv und knapp zusammenstellen sollen.
@annalist zeigte mir heute das Paperdes Büros für Technikfolgenabschätzung zu NFTs.
Nicht nur werden schon in den ersten zwei Absätzen sachlich falsche Informationen bereitgestellt. Denn natürlich können NFTs gar nichts über Off-Chain Dinge garantieren (Orakel Problem)
@annalist Noch schockierender ist die Quellenauswahl: Es gibt eigentlich keine Kritik. Weder aus der Zivilgesellschaft, noch aus der Wissenschaft (und gerade Wissenschaftler wie @ncweaver haben dazu ne Menge gemacht). Es gibt eher sowas:
#Blockchain as tech, #cryptocurrencies as assets and #web3 as a sociotechnical movement are three distinct things. One could like blockchains but not crypto or could like blockchains and crypto but not web3.
There are clear relationships though of course: web3 needs crypto and in most concepts blockchains (or closely related technologies that might have slightly different structures and affordances).
But it matters on what level the critique happens and in the case of for example web3 it's important to hit it on each level to make sure the house of cards crumbles.
"But blockchain is still young, use cases will come, it's normal"
Blockchain is about as old as the iPhone. Are smart phones still looking for a use case? Same for video-capable SLRs, flash-based storage or the Tesla roadster. All these things are Bitcoin's age.
With software the whole approach gets even more ridiculous: "React" which massively changed how people build web apps was released in 2013. Websockets, the de facto standard to build live-ish web apps is - like Bitcoin - from 2008.
We could go through all the tech that defines the tech-stacks of the biggest software systems in the world today (Node.js, Typescript, Go, Docker/Kubernetes, Ansible, etc.) and all are younger or just as old as Bitcoin/Blockchain. They all matter where Blockchain does not.