“The growth of US and UK AI companies will eventually be constrained by the lack of sufficient computing and electrical power which, if not remedied urgently, may force them to locate important facilities and capabilities in other countries.” 1/
via @ftft.com/content/95a4bd… ‘may force them to’ - Why give in to such boring economic and technological determinism. The subtitle of this article: “Rising middle powers will play a key role in the struggle for global technological supremacy”. As if this is necessarily about ‘supremacy’ 2/

A crucial new perspective on privacy by Bart van der Sloot: the right not be confronted with another’s inferences about one’s former self 1/ tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… “The linking pin between one set of events and another provided in our personal narrative is our sense of agency” 2/

“Wallace’s discovery that macroeconomics could shape microbiology was both a breakthrough and the beginning of the end of his academic career”

https://twitter.com/frankpasquale/status/1434246476729929729

“The social sciences are utterly critical to understand how things evolve at the molecular level,” he said” 2/

The usual: “Trying that shiny new algorithm out on a couple dozen seeds, and then only reporting the best few. Running a big hyperparameter sweep on your proposed approach but using the defaults for the baseline.” jacobbuckman.com/2021-05-29-ple… More of the usual: “Cherry-picking examples where your model looks good; cherry-picking whole datasets to test on, where you’ve confirmed your model’s advantage. Making up new problem settings, new datasets, new objectives in order to claim victory on an empty playing field.” 2/

“So these days Google’s staff is trying to blend anthropology with psychology, media studies and, yes, data science to create tools that might “inoculate” more internet users against dangerous misinformation.” Why are we not surprised? ft.com/content/4f0046… via @FinancialTimes “Will it fix the issue? Sadly not by itself, given the deep-seated societal roots of the problem. Nor will a dose of anthropology magically remove the anger that many people feel about the power of tech giants, and the sometimes irresponsible ways in which they have behaved.” 2/

Here we go “And in addition to improving the quality of legal advice (and hence the client’s decisions), legal analytics is reducing bias in the courtroom by providing full transparency, speeding up court proceedings, and improving access to justice”. 1/ forbes.com/sites/calumcha… “In future, it may be considered professional malpractice not to use legal analytics”. If people repeat this often enough it may become true @cohubicol1 2/

“It is not uncommon now for AI experts to ask whether an AI is ‘fair’ and ‘for good’. But ‘fair’ and ‘good’ are infinitely spacious words that any AI system can be squeezed into. The question to pose is a deeper one: how is AI shifting power?”

https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1281065903619108864

“In my view, those who work in AI need to elevate those who have been excluded from shaping it, and doing so will require them to restrict relationships with powerful institutions that benefit from monitoring people.“

@mikarv @HNissenbaum @xotoxot Though we should not be naive about two big tech giant getting together to redefine part of our global mobile infrastructure (sic!), we should maybe not exclude the possibility that by doing so they could save us from deeply invasive tracking apps 1/x @mikarv @HNissenbaum @xotoxot I am articulating carefully because I am not at all sure. Could the technical enforcement of keeping the data on one’s own device not prevent apps with a far more invasive centralisation than that described in blog.xot.nl/2020/04/11/sto… because they scale differently? 2/x