Nick Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher and professor who heads the Future of Humanity Institute at the British University of Oxford. Bostrom’s field of study is that of transhumanism and embraces areas such as cloning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), superintelligence, the possibility of transferring consciousness to technological supports, nanotechnologies and theses on simulated reality. As far as AI and its future developments are concerned, the professor and researcher is animated by a long-term “pessimistic” position: substantially, Bostrom believes that when AI will reach the level of superintelligence, i.e. when it will exceed human intelligence, it could easily pose a danger to all of humanity. Something that could happen over a very long period of time, even generational, but according to him could easily happen. To deepen this position and understand what the risks really are, but above all how AI works in view of the possible advent of superintelligence, we interviewed him.

Professor, you are strongly critical of the development of AI, with a very pessimistic long-term perspective on the dangers it could have for all of humanity. So I ask you: is it possible to teach a machine ethics, empathy and compassion, exclusively human values? How?

I’d say rather that I’m ambivalent about AI. I’m very optimistic about the potential upside, if we get things right, though I do also think there are serious risks involved with developing machine superintelligence. Exactly what we need to steer advanced AI systems to get a good outcome is not known yet, and that is an active research field. Many of the smartest people I know are now working in that field.

If human values could be taught to AI, knowing that man is not only characterized by positive values but can also be petty, sneaky and violent, could there be a risk that the machine, autonomously, knowing us, would assume these behaviors and become aggressive towards us?

Yes, though it could also become aggressive to us without such values.

Can Asimov’s laws of robotics be applied to AI? Yes/no why?

Asimov’s approach was too simplistic.

You believe that controlling the capabilities of AI can only be a temporary measure. Wouldn’t it be enough to insert a different type of algorithm that automatically inhibits any aggressive behavior? Is it possible to define such an algorithm?

Is it aggressive behavior when we pave over an ant colony to build a parking lot?

Knowing that AI works based on the dataset that we give it, wouldn’t it be enough to choose the dataset wisely to avoid nasty surprises?

Smart AIs can generalize beyond their training data, and they can build models of the world and use those models to understand novel situations and to make plans.

AI machines are faster than humans in learning concepts and reasoning, but they are still not capable of performing automatic human actions, those that are based on instinct. Will this gap ever be filled?

I think currently AIs are slower than humans in learning concepts. For example, ChatGPT-4 was trained on approximately all of the internet, but individual humans achieve similar concept understanding based on vastly less data.

L'articolo “AI is a risk for all humanity”, the interview to Nick Bostrom proviene da InsideOver.

Within months after its release, ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot developed by the US startup OpenAI, garnered tens of millions of users. Since then, a restricted preview version of Microsoft Bing has included a version of the technique. Technology journalists are now making predictions about how AI-assisted search engines will affect the rivalry between Google and Microsoft in the United States.

ChatGPT’s quick uptake is indicative of a larger trend: while AI tools have gained popularity recently, 2023 has been designated as the year when AI acquires a more pervasive presence in daily life. The development, use, and outcomes of artificial intelligence must all be examined with careful attention to Chinese trends. Inside the nation, political content monitoring, censorship, and public surveillance are frequently carried out using AI-driven methods.

The techniques developed by technology corporations under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) may also have effects on internet users, decision-makers, and businesses outside of China as the globe enters a new era of AI integration.

AI and China

In the upcoming year, it will be especially important to pay attention to the dynamics below about AI and China. The data that algorithms are trained on is reflected in the results. Hence, it is almost inevitable that censorship on social, political, and religious subjects will impact AI-generated material in China, and there is evidence that it already has. A machine-learning tool’s outputs will reflect the omissions and biases of the severely regulated and propaganda-infused information environment of the nation if it is primarily pulling information from within China’s infamous Great Firewall.

Researchers Margaret Roberts and Eddie Yang, for instance, discovered disparities in viewpoint between a natural language processing system trained on articles from Baidu’s Baike online encyclopedia and an alternative that was based on the worldwide, uncensored Chinese-language Wikipedia.

Election and democracy were both positively assessed by the globally trained algorithm, or they were linked to words like “stability.” Contrarily, individuals who had been schooled in Baidu Baike gave good evaluations to the keywords “surveillance” and “CCP” and connected concepts like “democracy” with unfavorable adjectives like “chaos.” Some AI systems could include filtering as a result of human oversight of information produced by machines.

Users like dissident artist Badiucao spotted loopholes and manipulation as soon as Chinese tech giant Baidu released its ERNIE-ViLG text-to-image generator in 2022. According to a research released in September by the MIT Technology Review, part of this censorship takes the form of phrases like “revolution” and “climb walls,” which are metaphors for utilizing anticensorship tools to access prohibited websites, as well as photos of Tiananmen Square and Chinese officials.

According to Baidu, ERNIE-ViLG was trained on a wide range of material, not simply data from China. As a result, the text-to-image generator’s censoring and omissions must have been purposefully included by the program’s creators in an effort to adhere to corporate and governmental norms. In fact, Chinese IT and social media businesses each have their own private blacklists and techniques to censorship in practice, despite the fact that the government and CCP give detailed regulations and instructions on censorship.

AI tools from these organizations may differ in different ways throughout time. Users in China have had only limited access to ChatGPT as users across the world experiment with it. The Great Firewall has not yet stopped it, although logging on requires a phone number from one of a select group of nations outside of China. On the Chinese internet, several copycats and workarounds have appeared; some are authentic, while others are more doubtful. Links to these workarounds apparently ceased showing up in search results on Alibaba’s Taobao and Tencent’s WeChat platforms from February 10. A number of regional AI-based chatbot initiatives are now under development and should be made available to the public this year.

AI in China

For instance, the ERNIE-Bot from Baidu is rumored to debut next month. Censorship and other forms of manipulation are likely to be visible in the chatbot’s output as well, given the company’s severely regulated search engine and the discoveries surrounding its AI text-to-image generator.

The inventor of ChatYuan, another AI chatbot operating as a mini-program within Tencent’s WeChat ecosystem, told reporters that ChatYuan would “filter specific terms” with more levels of inspection than one might anticipate internationally. It was discovered that several of the ChatGPT knockoffs mentioned above steer clear of subjects that are viewed as politically sensitive in China. But, even a chatbot with little censorship might create unforeseen outcomes.

Users should be on the lookout for any unintentional errors that go against the CCP’s desires given that ERNIE-Bot is apparently educated on worldwide data. Users might seek to turn the tables on Chinese chatbots, much as misinformation researchers have produced disturbing results by asking ChatGPT for writings from the perspective of the CCP or well-known conspiracy theorists.

What answers could ERNIE-Bot provide if asked about democracy, the Chinese constitution, or Xi Jinping from the viewpoint of rights advocates and dissidents like Liu Xiaobo or Gao Zhisheng, or Xi’s adversaries inside the CCP like Bo Xilai? What punishments would be in store for the business and its users, who are forced to register, if the answer breaches Chinese government censorship directives?

L'articolo China and Artificial Intelligence proviene da InsideOver.

For the past two years now, of course, it’s been the global pandemic and all the seemingly endless emotional and economic turmoil it has churned up that has dominated the headlines and the airwaves, as well as our thoughts and worries. Never far behind that is our dawning awareness of just how much trouble we’re really in as a result of the planetary heating we’ve wreaked upon ourselves – in fact, if anything has managed to break through the grim daily litany of half-contextualized COVID factoids in these years, and truly imprint itself upon on collective consciousness, it’s the harrowing coverage of firestorms and floods, heatwaves and hurricanes, ever more constant, seemingly everywhere and nearly all of unprecedented intensity.

For most of us, that’s entirely enough mental noise to contend with. If you have any attention left to spare, however, and you haven’t yet tuned out everything not immediately germane to the pressing needs of everyday survival, you may have perceived the thing that’s been bubbling along beneath the surface of events this whole time – something maybe harder to discern than the parade of figures about case rates or wind speeds, novel variants and calving ice shelves, but no less consequential for that. It is the steady accretion of news items suggesting that we stand on the verge of yet another epochal technosocial transformation. The long-awaited and now perceptibly becoming actual advent of novel technologies like machine learning, so-called “artifical intelligence,” virtual reality and cryptocurrency certainly seems like it has the potential to remake everyday life just about everywhere, especially in combination with one another.

Do technologies make the world, though? Among those of us who spend our days thinking about this sort of thing, this is a vexed, long- and intensely debated question. Attempts to understand the social and political consequences of technological development have tended to cluster around two major schools of thought, positions that are called “technological determinism” on the one hand, and “social constructivism” on the other.

For many, technodeterminism might seem to be the more natural and obvious position: someone invents a given technology, it appears in the world, and the world straightforwardly changes in response. (Indeed, some technologies actually do work this way, and are so potent as catalysts of societal change that the language we use to describe them reflects this. We simply call them “the Pill,” “the Bomb” and so on.) And there are plenty of other examples of this happening, or seeming to, ready to hand – our collective history with the internal combustion engine, for one, which would surely appear to underwrite belief in a certain technodeterminism. The introduction of cars powered by internal combustion manifestly drove the structuration of urban form in every densely settled place on Earth, with only relatively minor differences in layout and organization of cities developed after its widespread adoption, wherever they should happen to be found. If you wanted to argue that given enough time, novel technologies do more or less directly change the world, you’d be hard pressed to find a better case study than that.

The converse position, social constructionism, is a little more nuanced. It argues that societies invest in and select for the development of technologies that reflect their existing values, and particularly their power dynamics. For example, consider humanoid robotics. There has tended to be far more interest in the development of humanoid systems and interfaces in Japan than there has been elsewhere on Earth. There could be any number of reasons why this is so, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that it might have something to do with the greater emphasis placed in Japanese society on the potential for shame, embarrassment or humiliation inhering in all interactions between human beings (and therefore the desirability of replacing as many of the humans we interact with on a daily basis as possible with unfeeling, unjudging synthetics). This would seem to bolster the contention that a technology can prosper and develop only where it finds culturally fertile ground.

In actuality, of course, things drop out somewhere between the two extremes. Where does this leave us, if we want to understand what the advent of cryptocurrency or machine learning or virtual reality might portend for us, and for the world we share? Instead of the crude binary of technodeterminism and social constructionism, what I’d like to propose is a soft constructionism, in which the hegemonic global culture we think of as “late capitalism” selects not so much which technologies we get in any absolute sense, but which versions of them thrive in our world.

Seen in this light, those technological choices will fare best which resonate most with the scarcity-based economics and deep-seated fear of the Other that already characterize our lives. Far from being “disruptive,” what they’re really offering is a continuation or extension of circumstances that are already familiar to us.

“Artificial intelligence” could mean just about anything. But what are the applications that actually receive investment? Of all the possibilities we might have been offered, the ones that are advancing most quickly appear to be those dedicated to police, surveillance and security functions — identifying exceptions from the statistical norm, tracking them through space and time, and placing bounds around their freedom of action. If you want a sense of the aesthetics driving this investment, to say nothing of the values, look no further than the lengthening list of ventures billionaire PayPal and Facebook investor Peter Thiel has named for figures from his Lord of the Rings fixation — the vendor of sinister “total information awareness” systems Palantir, the manufacturer of weaponized autonomous drones Anduril and so on.

Or consider virtual reality, that realm of putatively limitless imagination Mark Zuckerberg would be pleased if we described with the word “metaverse.” With a staggering impoverishment of sensibility, the verson on offer from Zuckerberg’s Meta not merely imposes an entirely artificial scarcity into a realm that might otherwise extend to the very horizons of the imagination, but turns that same expanse into a platform where cloyingly infantilized avatars doze through the self-same boring meetings they might have had on Zoom with dignity still more or less intact. It’s as if the entire universe and all of its wonders had been crafted by and for people with LinkedIn accounts.

And then there’s crypto. Crypto is a little different. It was always an ideological project – avowedly anarchocapitalist by design, offering no vision of society beyond a threadbare neo-Randian fantasy of contract relations undertaken between sovereign individuals — so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be awful. (If anything, given the long history of inventions that confound or undermine their original design intention, the surprise is that crypto appears to be enacting its awfulness so straightforwardly.) It nevertheless hurts a little to see the truly radical concept of a distributed autonomous organization, or “DAO,” originally intended to provide a trellis for endeavors assembling human and nonhuman partners, remade as mortifyingly tacky nightclub/bottle-service party for Supreme-stanning manchildren.

But surely these examples don’t represent the full potential of the technologies in question? As it happens, I come from an intellectual tradition insisting that any appearance of the word “potential” needs to be greeted with the greatest skepticism. There is no such thing as potential, in this view: there are merely states of a system that have historically been enacted, and those that have not yet been enacted. The only way to assess whether a system is capable of assuming a given state is to do the work of enacting it. This is why I tend to look askance at the more fervent enthusiasts for these technologies, making  breathless claims for their unlimited liberatory potential. In practice, the only realities that seem to be cropping out so far are markedly tawdry. And while it is certainly early days, and one should always be charitable, I think it’s fair to say that a pattern can already be discerned.

Virtually everywhere, technologies are touted to us on the promise that they will permanently displace human subjectivity and bias, annihilate the painful limits imposed upon us by our embodiment and our mooring in the real world, liberate us to be the sparkling Nietzschean (or really Olympian) creatures of pure will we ought to have been all along. And yet in every instance we find that these ambitions are flouted, as the technologies that were supposed to enact them are captured and recuperated by existing concentrations of power. They will not spontaneously bring scarcity to an end, or capitalism, or oppression. Laminated into standing ways of doing, making and selling, the only thing they seem to be capable of spontaneously reproducing is more of the same. The bottom line is this: those of us who dream of different, more hopeful, freer futures, and who still believe that technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual reality or the blockchain have a place in building them, will have to do the hard, painstaking work of proving this to be the case. We have our work cut out for us.

L'articolo The technological revolution in the “late capitalism” era proviene da InsideOver.

AI is a science and a technology that has applications in almost every aspect of our everyday life. We use it when we swipe a credit card, when we search something on the web, when we take a picture with our cameras, when we give vocal commands to our phone or another device, and when we interact with many apps and social media platforms. Companies of every size and business model, all over the world, are adopting AI solutions to optimize their operations, create new services and work modalities, and help their professionals in making more informed and better decisions.

So there is no doubt that AI is a powerful technology that has already imprinted itself positively on our ways of living and will continue to do so for years to come. At the same time, the transformations it brings to our personal and professional lives are very significant and fast, and this raises questions and concerns about the impact of AI on our society. AI systems need to be designed to be aware of, and to follow, important human values so that the technology can help us make better, wiser decisions that are simultaneously human-value-aligned.

Let us review some of the main AI ethics issues:

Data governance.

AI needs a lot of data, so questions about data privacy, storage, sharing, and governance are central for this technology.

In some regions of the world, such as Europe, there are specific regulations to state fundamental rights for the “data subject”, that is, the human being releasing personal data to an AI system that can then use it to make decisions affecting his/her life (see for example the GDPR EU regulation).

Fairness

Based on huge amounts of data that surround every human activity, AI is able to derive insights and knowledge on which to make decisions about humans or recommends decisions to a human. However, we need to make sure that the AI system understands and follows the relevant human values in the context in which such decisions are made. A very important human value is fairness: we don’t want AI systems to make (or recommend) decisions that could discriminate against or perpetuate harm across groups of people (for example, based on race, gender, class, or ability). How do we make sure that AI can act according to the most appropriate notion of fairness (or any other human value) in each scenario in which it is applied?

Software tools are important but they are not enough: also developers’ education and training, team diversity, governance, and multi-stakeholder consultations are crucial for effective AI bias detection and mitigation.

Explainability and trust

Often the most successful AI techniques, such as those based on machine/deep learning, are opaque in terms of allowing humans to understand how they reach their conclusions from the input data. This does not help when trying to build a system of trust between humans and machines, so it is important to adequately address concerns related to transparency and explainability.

Without trust, a doctor will not follow the recommendation of a decision support system that can help in making better decisions for his/her patients.

Accountability

Machine learning is based on statistics, so it always has a percentage of error, even if small. This happens even if no programmer actually made any mistake in developing the AI system. So, when an error occurs, who is responsible? To whom should we ask for a redress or a compensation? This raises questions related to responsibility and accountability.

Profiling and manipulation

AI can interpret our actions and the data we share online to make a

“profile” of us, a sort of abstract characterization of some of our traits, preferences, and values, to be used to personalize services (for example, to show us posts or ads that we most likely will appreciate). Without appropriate guardrails, this approach can twist the relationship between humans and online service providers by designing the service in order to make our preferences more clearly characterized, and thus the personalization easier to compute. This raises issues of human agency: are we really in control of our actions, or is AI being used to nudge us to the point of manipulating us?

Impact on jobs and larger society

Since AI permeates our workplace functioning, it obviously has an impact on jobs (since it can perform some cognitive tasks that usually were done by humans), and these impacts need to be better understood and addressed to make sure humans aren’t disadvantaged. As mentioned earlier, AI is very pervasive and its applicability expands very rapidly, so any negative impacts of this technology could be extremely detrimental for individuals and society.  The pace at which AI is being applied within the workplace (and outside of it) also brings concerns about people and institutions having enough time to understand the real consequences of its use and avoid a possible negative impact.

Control and value alignment

Although AI has a lot of applications, it is still very far from achieving forms of intelligence close to humans (or even animals). However, the fact that this technology is mostly unknown to the general public raises (usually unwarranted) concerns about being able to control it and to make it aligned to our larger and sometimes disparate societal values, should it achieve a higher form of intelligence.

Many organizations (companies, governments, professional societies, multi-stakeholder initiatives) have already been working for years to identify the relevant AI ethics issues, define principles and commitments, derive guidelines and best practices, and operationalize them in their divisions. IBM has been leading in this space, with its tools, educational initiatives, internal governance structure (led by the IBM AI Ethics board), and its numerous partnerships with other companies, civil society organizations, and policy makers. A multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder approach is the only one that can effectively drive a responsible development and use of AI in our society.

L'articolo What are the main ethical issues in the development of AI? proviene da InsideOver.

The European Union is poised to make 2020 a banner year for regulation of artificial intelligence (AI). Officials from the bloc floated the idea in January that they would move to rein in tech companies leveraging AI to harvest mass amounts of data. On Feb. 19, regulators made public plans to restrict machine learning technologies which affect a broad range of private and public use cases. Data-sharing rules are also likely to be included in the EU’s Digital Services Act in a move against social media platforms.

How Do Organizations Use AI?

Artificial intelligence allows companies and organizations to process massive amounts of data at a rate that far exceeds human capabilities. The technology can be trained to identify faces in a crowd, for example, or to sift through nearly a million pages of documents to identify the juiciest details. 

Machine learning helps companies develop such systems by using algorithms to find patterns in a data-set. Through machine learning, AI systems continually improve themselves without the need for a human to program the advancements manually.

Facebook serves as a popular example of machine learning in use, owing in part to the defiance of its CEO to restrict the company’s business practices. As users upload more photos to the social media platform, either of themselves or people they know and machine learning helps identify them before users do. When a user decides to tag a photo, often the correct name of the individual is already at the top of the list because Facebook’s AI already knows who it is.

The company also relies heavily on AI to connect users, commonly through the “people you may know” feature. As users sync their phone and email contacts, and connect to mutual acquaintances, Facebook uses AI to accurately predict other possible friends on the website. 

Facebook even uses AI to create shadow profiles for people who do not have Facebook accounts. These shadow profiles are also generated from scanning phone numbers and email addresses, then cross-referencing the data with other users who have the same contacts in their phones. When a person eventually signs up for a Facebook account, the ‘people you may know’ tool is likely to make some fairly accurate guesses.

AI can also be leveraged for more sinister activities, such as in China. The Communist Party of China recently employed AI facial recognition software to identify Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang Province. The software, forced onto smartphones across the region, also scanned photo albums, emails, and other data on the devices in order to perform “threat” assessments. Results from the system have been used as a basis to detain an estimated one million members of the ethnic group in concentration camps. 

Why is AI a Concern for the United States and EU?

Legislators, both in the United States and the EU, are worried that companies such as Facebook are abusing privacy rights. There is a growing concern that people do not have the ability to opt out of systems processing their data, such as Facebook’s “people you may know” feature and shadow profiles. They did not agree to create an account and legally have not allowed their data, including facial identities, to be harnessed by the tech giant.

Secondly, there is a question of how the data is used by companies. Data is vital to businesses such as Facebook that leverage it for targeted advertising. The better data a media platform has, the more enticing it is for a company to advertise on it because it can hone in on users who are more likely to purchase its product. Data sharing between companies that collect it and third-party partners raises the questions of who really owns the information and did users consent to sharing it without their knowledge?  

Furthermore, there are legitimate security concerns. After a massive Facebook data leak exposing information of practically every user, investigations made clear the company culture did not prioritize securing its servers.

Then there is a question of who is liable for content posted on social media platforms. Do companies such as Facebook have a responsibility to police content and could they be held legally culpable for posts on their platforms? 

Finally, there are antitrust allegations against major tech companies. A recent EU case resulted in Google suffering a $9 billion fine. Companies with large data-sets can use it to promote its own products over those of its rivals. In Google’s case, the European Court of Justice ruled it improperly used its power of the search engine to direct traffic to its own shopping ads rather than its rivals.

What Will the EU Do? 

The EU will work on drafting the Digital Services Act this year. It will likely place restrictions on how companies may use AI across a broad swath of industries including medical screening and self-driving cars, WSJ reported. The legislation may also impose limits on how much data is collected, such as the number of faces in a crowd that are allowed to be identified and shown.

Regulators are also considering a mandate that humans oversee machine-learning tasks and properly disclose which data sets the data will be stored in.

To combat antitrust allegations, the EU may decide to force larger companies to share the data it collects with smaller rivals. 

The EU is also seeking to boost European companies. Presently, the European Commission considers European states behind the US and China in terms of data operations. So while it would like to restrict the data practices of current tech leaders, the EU would like to build its own industry through investments totaling €20 billion per year.

“We recognize we missed the first battle, the battle of personal data,” said EU Commissioner Thierry Breton. “Europe has everything it takes to lead the ‘big data’ race, and preserve its technological sovereignty.”

In short, the EU appears miffed that companies such as Facebook continually run afoul of protecting and using the personal information of Europeans. As a response, it will crackdown on AI practices this year and look to foster European competition that will hopefully be easier to control and regulate.

L'articolo EU to Regulate Artificial Intelligence and Data Sharing in 2020 proviene da InsideOver.

As we progress daily with our lives, our work and our plans for the future, there are many ideas that we come across. The advancement of technology is one area where rapid changes have been made, offering many solutions for people who have been otherwise unable to achieve something valuable or necessary. Technology in today’s world is not only meant to simplify our daily tasks but is also being used to help us break barriers and reach objectives that may formerly have been impossible. However, not all technology is good technology, or in other words, might not result in the best of decisions when given to those most likely to misuse it.

Dependence On Technology

The rapid advancement in technology through wireless services and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has helped us in ways unimaginable before. Today, we are as dependent on technology as we are on basic utilities like food and water. AI is the main source of these new ideas and one must not forget that this field holds the key for our future progress. Many countries are adopting AI to change the way the world looks at them, with the United States, China, Russia, Germany, France and Canada are leading the race in AI. Now one might think what’s the benefit of AI for a nation? The answer is that the main area where these countries and others are planning to use this technology and similar ideas is in weaponry and advanced systems so as to better defend themselves and attain geopolitical dominance. This means investing millions in research, development and execution of advanced AI projects.

The AI Arms Race

Artificial Intelligence today is mostly being used to minimize human errors and go beyond situations that would make everyday life more efficient and independent from external factors. The AI arms race is a very sensitive topic towards which countries pay immense attention. The Pentagon’s budget alone for AI arms stands at a whopping $2 billion. The United States Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper recently stated that arming and advancing the military of the United States through AI is in response to competition brought forward by Russia and China, the two main competitors of the United States in all relevant fields. The United States says that at this point in time, the necessity and priority lies in modernization.

Replacing humans with robots is another point of focus that the United States is rapidly working towards. Hypersonic technologies and weaponizing AI are currently the most important ideas of this new change. A report published by China in 2017 stated that the country is aiming to reach the summit in AI by introducing the technology in weapons through AI-powered guns, advanced computer systems and robots capable of virtually making no mistakes at all. Yes, introducing the technology in weapons may lead to a bigger problem where there will be more competition but at the same time it will reduce the number of lives lost accidentally due to human error. Russia at the same time is also upping its capabilities.

AI Regulation Is Needed

What our systems lack today is sufficient regulation. I believe that if AI is regulated thoroughly, it would help create a safer way to compete and deescalate the arms race. Unrestricted development of such programs will only pave the way for more problems.

The strategies being used by the United States are the ones that have set a benchmark for this new arms race. The United States has the capacity and resources to advance the skills and approach of its military in countless ways. Operations, training, protection and healthcare are all being fitted with artificial intelligence to minimize any potential shortcomings and to give an edge wherever possible. Machine learning, neural networks and computer algorithms are swiftly playing their role in this development which are programmed so as to engage in conflicts with a superior edge in their workings.

Elsewhere in Israel and Russia, the focus has been locked on monitoring and locking potential targets through AI-run systems. Russia is basing its programs on developing autonomous drones and tanks capable of showing great devastation in times of conflicts. While these ideas may seem super-efficient, some experts have questioned the credibility of these rapid advancements. They say that despite modern warfare being a core component of revolutionizing our path towards the future it may have severe consequences.

Artificial Intelligence may be the next best step in getting the massive advantages that we can from a comprehensive revolution and digitalization of technology. Competitive advantage can be gained to make use of opportunities that could not be possible elsewhere. However, an important issue that needs to be addressed is the fact that we as humans must understand that there could be some looming economic, security and social risks that may arise with these new developments. In light of these problems our main focus should be on prevention of bloodshed and using these developments to have a brighter future ahead of us.

L'articolo Artificial Intelligence And Modern Warfare: Necessity Or Exploitation? proviene da InsideOver.

In constantly evolving technology, governments – ponderous elephants at the best of times – are having headaches keeping up with developments. Drones are a major problem worldwide, threatening aircraft. Social media giants like Facebook have shown to be used to interfere with democratic elections.

In Canada, with a federal election set for Oct. 19, a Nanos Research poll found that six out of 10 Canadians were certain that Facebook would play a negative influence during the campaign and that the site does not adequately protect against such tactics.

EU officials said before the spring elections earlier this year that Russia has been seeding disinformation for years, attempting to erode citizen trust in EU countries. And in the United States, intelligence agencies said Russia surreptitiously interfered in the 2016 election and helped Donald Trump win the White House. Of course, the Kremlin denies it all.

EU officials in Brussels have confronted the Russian misinformation threat with the formation of the Eastern Stratcom Task Force. Its 15 members are charged with exposing Kremlin involvement in the spread of misinformation designed to confuse the population and sow discord. Russia appears to have caught democracy sleeping, with tactics that undermine elective governments and leave the democracies of the world scrambling to mitigate the damage.

But when acting to curtail such abuse, governments in their zealousness also can run afoul of freedom of expression, a keystone of democracy.

India, the world’s largest democracy, routinely employs internet shutdowns – 134 in 2018 – but such action contravenes freedom of expression and goes against India’s stated goal of using internet technology to feed economic development.

There is no win-win with the internet. Vigilance is the key, and governments will have to set up whole departments dedicated to constantly crawling the internet to identify misinformation, a step the EU took with formation of its task force mentioned earlier.

They are running from behind – not just in social media surveillance – but in other rapidly changing fields. The technology explosion and its misuse are not just digital and limited to political interference.

For example, governments everywhere are grappling with the huge surge in drones. In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration set up its drone registration with an initial 470,000 of the ubiquitous flying objects. As of February 2019, that number had swelled to 1.3 million. Airports have been forced to halt or delay flights at Gatwick, Heathrow, Newark, Dubai and Dublin thanks to these devices.

Every government is once again scrambling to keep pace with regulations as the drone population mushrooms.

Perhaps the situation is best expressed on the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle website, where drone laws are listed by country accompanied by this disclaimer: “Drone laws are constantly changing. To stay up to date on the latest drone laws changes, sign up for an account to receive drone law notifications…”

But perhaps the most difficult technology facing governments worldwide is Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Alan Turing, the brilliant British mathematician who developed the concept of artificial intelligence and the modern computer circa 1950, and Stuart Russell, a renown computer scientist, all opined that AI would change the world – or maybe “annihilate it”, as an article by VOX put it.

Still in its infancy since current computers can only perform limited tasks such as playing chess, they nevertheless have demonstrated the human trait of deviance. AI computers have shown to employ cheating to win at a game.

And as they get more powerful, computers can get more devious and perhaps surpass the human brain for computation. Elon Musk, of Telsa, PayPal and SpaceX fame, so fears AI that he said it is more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

“If I were to guess, like, what our biggest existential threat is, it is probably that (AI),” Musk said, speaking at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology symposium. “With Artificial Intelligence, we are summoning the demon.” It remains to be seen if the lumbering pachyderm that is government will be able to control the demon.

L'articolo As Technology Relentlessly Advances, Governments Scramble to Keep Up proviene da InsideOver.

Hong Kong’s current resistance to an increasingly authoritarian China is indicative of the Western World’s folly that began with President Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. The United States’ then-assumption that a diplomatic opening to China, and consequently the opening of American markets to Chinese goods, would result in the liberalization of China’s political life turned out to be a monumentally false assumption. Over the past four decades, as China’s economic power has grown, so too has its capacity to project military power farther afield, resulting in saber rattling at Pacific neighbors including Vietnam and Japan. Ironically, in an effort to contain the then-Soviet Union, the United States fed its true great power rival of the 21st century, China, with the economic growth it needed to consolidate its hold on the Asia Pacific. Consequently, the United States handed China four decades of peace during which it could grow its economy and military power.

The Nixon Administration suffered a fundamental failure of strategic imagination: with its booming population, China long term would turn out to be the far more dangerous great power opponent in comparison to Russia. The consequences of this strategic blunder are today obvious: the presumed Chinese social and political liberalization never materialized; instead, today we ironically have a China that seizes American artificial intelligence (AI) and facial recognition technology to develop ever more oppressive monitoring tools to use against its citizens. This high-tech Big Brother apparatus is improving with each passing day, snuffing out any true hope of Chinese dissidents ever effectively organizing a democratic resistance.

This phenomenon is well-demonstrated in Hong Kong’s current resistance to the growing Chinafication of their political and judicial systems. Today, the Chinese mainland is seeking to suffocate Hong Konger democratic sentiment. Though China has suffered a setback via the travails of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, Carrie Lam, as she suffers resistance from Hong Kongers concerning possible extradition to mainland China for crimes, this is but a temporary victory for Hong Konger democracy. The overriding trend is already in place: increasing government surveillance of the Hong Kong populace, an increasing culture of cracking down on peaceful protest, and an increased willingness to overtly challenge Western support for pro-democracy sympathizers. And with the rising military and economic might of China, formerly passionate foreign supporters of democracy are increasingly cowed into silence for fear of Chinese reprisals.

Now is the time for the United States to reverse decades of flawed policy based on the fundamentally false assumption that building up China’s economy within the Western world order would lead to a more democratic China, and begin to fully support both Hong Kong and Taiwan in the face of heightening Chinese intimidation tactics against their democratic institutions and pro-democracy populace. The Trump Administration’s continued trade tariffs and other countermeasures are wisely restricting Chinese access to American intellectual property. The United States would be wise to work more closely with its major domestic AI developers such as Google to constructively navigate how American private enterprise may inadvertently transfer critical AI technology know-how to China. Without a focused public/private partnership within the United States, China will continue to grocery shop for the technology that will assist it best in bolstering its authoritarian control over its citizens.

L'articolo American Folly: China, Hong Kong, Democracy proviene da InsideOver.