Today, a crisp one-sentence open letter warning about existential AI threat: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

I did not sign the letter.

https://twitter.com/DanHendrycks/status/1663474795865059329?s=20

A lot of smart, thoughtful, genuinely brilliant colleagues have signed the letter, and it follows on earlier alarms about AI, including one from February worried that “Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth ... .” nytimes.com/2023/03/29/tec…

Failing to deal with this company’s behavior when it started is the biggest public policy failure in the digital space in a generation. Reining it in is that much tougher now that it’s well-funded and so frequently used by government clients. washingtonpost.com/technology/202… @drewharwell This is … not how principles are supposed to work.

Some extraordinary quotes in this piece. It’s hard not to conclude from it that many Republican officials believe that only Republicans can be trusted to administer elections, and only Republicans can legitimately win them. (Any Rs who do certify a D victory are also purged.)

https://twitter.com/reidepstein/status/1406223649414201346

This really drives home @AdamSerwer’s observation that “fraud” can encompass the idea that one’s opponents are illegitimate participants in politics and governing, even if they’re fellow Americans. amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/61…

With the help of the ace @nytimes digital team, we compiled a list of ~2.2 million externally-facing hyperlinks that had been used in nytimes.com articles since its launch in 1996. The goal was to discern how many of them had fallen victim to linkrot or content drift. A link "rots" when it no longer works -- which can happen if the server hosting it is taken down, if a web site is reorganized (especially if it changes ownership), or if a takedown request or demand has eliminated access to that page. This happens a lot.

From the Epic v. Apple battle over Apple's centrally-controlled app store: to justify only allowing Apple-approved apps on iPhones and iPads (and forbidding "side-loading" of other apps by phone owners), Apple's SVP of engineering disparages Mac security. apple.slashdot.org/story/21/05/19… These are not new worries! From 2007 (!) -- just as the iPhone was taking off -- some thoughts on how security would justify centralized control and its anti-innovation drawbacks: yupnet.org/zittrain/2008/…

NFTs are the latest reprise of the Internet's original democratizing promise -- and the gold rush that follows when there's money in the air. In this case, out of thin air. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… So, @Williamjmarks5 and I sat down to work through the current NFT mania -- itself built on top of the cryptocurrency/blockchain mania -- and see whether there's a there there. (Below: is it soh-rawr-ey? oh: so-rare)

Last year, just before the pandemic hit, I gave the @clarehall_cam Tanner Lectures on Human Values, reflecting on how tech has empowered humanity -- and yet it rightly feels like we have less and less control. today.law.harvard.edu/gaining-power-… That added power, for example, doesn't just make autonomous vehicles work without drivers. It means those cars can answer to, say, law enforcement authorities instead of the passengers -- locking the doors and driving them to the nearest police station if a warrant is issued.

This story has a strong lede and discussion about how unprecedented, and ill-grounded (indeed, groundless), the Trump campaign's efforts are to overturn voters' decisions in Michigan and elsewhere. But it slips a bit into casual horserace mode over attempted election-stealing. --

https://twitter.com/ChrisMegerian/status/1329433203627659270

If reporters covered assassinations the way they're talking about current events: "Some in the campaign have floated plans to physically attack the winning candidate. However, most agree their clumsiness and existing police protection renders that approach a mere fever dream."

I think there's a key barrier to uphold, where players of hardball feel like they must deny it's a mere exercise of power they can get away with, and say instead that circumstances/principles compel them to their actions. Because then any hypocrisy will slow them down. ...

https://twitter.com/BostonJoan/status/1328871231861518338

We saw this in the refusal to hold a hearing for Garland; it was couched as a rule about election-year Court vacancies rather than as "we won't seat him because we're Team R and you're Team D, and we have the votes." Seating ACB became: we have the votes. ...

Lots going on here: Twitter labels this tweet for violating Twitter’s rules about glorifying violence; the tweet stays up because of its “public importance” test; Twitter further disables retweeting without comment so it can’t go viral so easily. RT with comment is OK.

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1266231100780744704

Then, the official White House account has repeated the words Donald Trump said as realdonaldtrump - “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” - perhaps to associate the full force of the office of the Presidency with them. I imagine Twitter rules will apply again.

A+ analysis of debate over responsible disclosure of AI advances by @RebeccaCrootof.

What’s riskier for tech that could cause great harm: democratization where nearly anyone can abuse it, or hoarding by a handful of big companies/gov’ts?

https://twitter.com/paulnemitz/status/1187870774763372544

For nuclear weapons, non-proliferation seems the strategy. (Though the non-proliferation is of physical materials like enriched uranium, rather than knowledge of how to build a bomb, which has ultimately proven hard to contain.)

This is a compelling account of data leakage through dodgy but popular browser extensions. To do a small useful task -- like letting you easily zoom in a picture on a web page -- an extension will ask for full permissions to read and modify everything you see as you surf. ...

https://twitter.com/terri_rupar/status/1151863610425167873

... Thousands of extensions ask for and get that access from users who have no reason to know that, say, the URLs they click on will be shared for "marketing" purposes, eventually finding their way to brokers like Nacho Analytics, who then sell the data to anyone who pays ...