New paper from @ria_kalluri, @willie_agnew, @chengmyra1, @KentrellOwens, @soldni & I!

The Surveillance AI Pipeline:

We unearth how computer vision research powers Surveillance AI through analysis of 3 decades of CV papers from CVPR & downstream patents
1 arxiv.org/abs/2309.15084
Scholars from surveillance studies have long argued that AI research, & CV in particular, feeds mass surveillance. Yet, the direct path from CV to surveillance has remained obscured & difficult to assess. Our paper is the 1st to demonstrate this with rich empirical evidence.

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New paper!📢
On Hate Scaling Laws for Data-Swamps with @vinayprabhu, Sang Han & @VishnuBoddeti
Paper:
Code: https://t.co/rfK541SIql

WARNING: Contains examples of hateful text & NSFW images that might be disturbing, distressing, &/or offensive

Long 🧵
1/ https://t.co/5slkQpPYxvarxiv.org/abs/2306.13141
github.com/vinayprabhu/ha…
What is the cost of scale? To find out, we audit the-LAION 400M and LAION-2B-en datasets (and models trained on them), the datasets behind Stable Diffusion & other SoTA models.

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we do. we wrote about 2 major undersea cables in Africa owned by Google & Meta explaining how they 1) physically follow the transatlantic slave trade route & 2) ideologically constitute a new form of digital colonialism. our paper was rejected cuz it doesn't reference Western lit

https://twitter.com/the_transit_guy/status/1654517006207447040

our choice to mainly cite African scholars was intentional (not because we aren't aware of Western folks writing on decolonialism) but that unfortunately got us rejected

Nick Bostrom, Longtermism, & the Eternal Return of Eugenics by @xriskology truthdig.com/dig/nick-bostr…

part of what Bostrom, an Oxford University philosopher who’s been profiled by The New Yorker & become highly influential in Silicon Valley, sent to the listserv of “Extropians”

1/ "longtermism, which emerged out of the effective altruism (EA) movement over the past few years, is eugenics on steroids."

📢Indaba Awards 2023📢 a celebration of African research excellence & impactful work in Artificial Intelligence. These awards are a celebration of intellectual giants of our continent.

Apply/nominate/spread the word! deeplearningindaba.com/blog/2023/01/d…

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https://twitter.com/DeepIndaba/status/1616432338472435712

1) The Kambule Doctoral Award, in Honour of Dr Thamsanqa W. Kambule, one of South Africa's greatest mathematician & teacher remembered for his life’s contribution to education, specifically Black education under the Bantu Education Act.

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longtermism might be one of the most influential ideologies that few people outside of elite universities & Silicon Valley ever heard abt. as a former longtermist, I have come to see this worldview as most dangerous secular belief system in the world today aeon.co/essays/why-lon… Initial thing to notice is longtermism,as proposed by Bostrom & Beckstead, is not equivalent to ‘caring about the long term’/‘valuing the wellbeing of future generations’. Goes way beyond this. At its core is a simple–albeit flawed–analogy b/n indv'l persons & humanity as a whole

in 2021 NYU informed us that they were going to take all of our gift money, leaving us w the choice of litigating, which is expensive & which AI Now can’t pay for, or of walking & trying to make up the over $4M that was effectively stolen by the university networkcultures.org/wp-content/upl… "That moment has passed, and critical work is in a very precarious position right now. We need much more space to discuss and strategize given this, and I worry that the polite rooms assembled by funders aren’t providing this."

okay, let's talk substance. let's start with the atrocities committed by Meta/facebook. when someone is held accountable and ready to redress these harms, we can start a "rational debate"

Meta not only amplifies but funds misinformation technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/103…

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https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1595463590219218952

when whistleblowers from within detail how Meta is manipulating global politics, they are fired buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/craigs…

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Decolonization and Afro-Feminism – Sylvia #Tamale #amreading #Tamale

Critical Complexity – Paul #Cilliers

Collected Essays Edited by Rika Preiser #amreading

(NB: most of this book’s content was written before Cilliers death in 2011 so please keep this context in mind in light of some of his views esp around the topics of AI, neural nets, etc) The argument is against unreflective speed, speed at all cost, or, more precisely, against speed as a virtue in itself: against the alignment of “speed” with notions like efficiency, success, quality and importance. #Cilliers