Power Meets Surveillance: the Rise of Digital Tyranny?
From the ‘trust demolition’ of Google taking over DeepMind’s healthcare app — trained as it was on NHS data — to the hard nosed corporate tactics we found out were used by Facebook against negative press, this has been another consequential week at the intersection of ethics and tech
Technology is never neutral. Technology reflects society. This week, we look at some of the implications of this — and, one again, at the need to educate leaders to properly oversee the new age of power.
My colleague James Kingston has been hard at work on our upcoming AI Ethics primer, which gives you your ‘need to know’ introduction to the world of ethics in AI. Do you have an ethics related product, service, or piece of research? Give him an email on james.kingston@cognitionx.io
Read on to hear about tech education for politicians, how Chinese tech may be used for social control, and how openness and flexibility can be used to obscure power.
Education
Harvard researchers want to school Congress on AI
The lamentable performance of US Senators when questioning Mark Zuckerberg was the subject of widespread millennial mockery — and not a little disquiet. Sensing an urgent need to educate lawmakers on AI, some Harvard researchers are now giving them a ‘tech boot camp.’ Perhaps we could see something similar in the UK?
Corporate Surveillance
This US Firm Wants to Help Build China’s Surveillance State
Intriguing piece on Remark Holdings, a small public US company that now sells facial recognition technology in China. It illustrates the fall in barriers to entry in the use of, showing how even a ‘small time website operator’ can develop a facial recognition system — and “take AI technology places that companies with more name recognition can’t, or won’t.” How do we encourage small firms to maintain similar ethical standards to those we force upon leading software providers?
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Freedom, Privacy
How ZTE helps Venezuela create China-style social control
Fascinating article on Venezuela’s new ‘fatherland card’ its potential as an instrument of social control, and the role of the Chinese telecom company ZTE in providing this tool to the government. As Chinese tech companies continue their outward expansion and China’s government continues to extend the One Belt One Road program in Eurasia and further afield, Chinese models of tech-mediated social engineering are likely to gain traction elsewhere.
Geopolitical Competition
Techno-Orientalism? The use of metaphor when discussing technology and society is always an interesting one. We wonder what Said would have made of China’s society being described as a ‘black box’ and the Chinese skill at Deep Learning as connected to Chinese medicine. Nevertheless, this article highlights an important question — how will the political economy of Chinese society affect the technology it creates?
Geopolitical competition, Education
Peking University to Build AI-Focused Campus
The ‘Oxford of China’, Peking University, is building a huge new AI-focused campus — further illustrating the mobilization of Chinese government and private efforts around AI since the apparent ‘Sputnik moment’ of AlphaGo. What will this mean for the future leadership of innovation?
Social Organisation
A 1970s essay predicted Silicon Valley’s High Minded Tyranny
‘Ethics’ are to a large extent a product of social structures — structures that set the terms of human action and provide patterns of value and meaning. We must therefore consider how hierarchy operates — and how “rhetoric of openness “becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others.””
