Category: Politics

Trump calls dibs on outer space with his latest executive order


Donald Trump‘s latest executive order comes straight out of science fiction: He’s officially called dibs on outer space. All of it. The order, titled “Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources,” calls for an international effort to determine how we should all divvy up outer space. On the surface that sounds like a good idea. The US is on the verge of setting up a permanent Moon base and now seems like a great time to sort out the economical and financial logistics. Per a White House statement describing the order: Supportive policy regarding the recovery…

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New US Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany ran a racist, right-wing conspiracy blog


I’m about three hours into a deep wallow in new US Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s blog and – spoiler alert – it’s a hot mess full of racism, Islamophobia, and right-wing conspiracy theories. The website – whose name changed from RealReaganConservative.Com to PoliticalProspect.com – appears to have gone into “maintenance mode” back in 2016, which of course coincides with Trump’s election. It appears McEnany had a lot to say about African Americans, liberals, Muslims (with a specific emphasis on Palestinians), and Christian conspiracy theories. In fact, several stories that were apparently published for public consumption during the lifespan of the…

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Washington state passes Microsoft-approved facial recognition laws


Washington state has adopted sweeping facial recognition laws seen as a national model, much to the pleasure of Microsoft president Bill Smith. “This legislation represents a significant breakthrough — the first time a state or nation has passed a new law devoted exclusively to putting guardrails in place for the use of facial recognition technology,” Smith wrote in a blog post. But why is Microsoft so happy about new tech restrictions coming to its own home state? Probably because the company helped create them. Microsoft lobbied hard for the bill, which was sponsored by own of its own employees: State…

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The coronavirus is strengthening the case for free internet access


The rise of social-distancing and self-isolation spawned by the coronavirus has reignited calls to make free internet access to be considered as a human right and universal entitlement. Among the proponents is Citizens Online, a charity that campaigns against digital exclusion, which has urged the UK government to make the internet free for everyone in the country during the pandemic. The organization argues that older people were already more likely to experience digital inequality prior to the outbreak. More than a third of people over 65 and more than half of those over 75 had either never used the internet…

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ACLU sues US government over its use of facial recognition at airports


The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the US government over its failure to reveal details about the use of facial recognition at airports. On Thursday, the ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to order a range of federal agencies to hand over their records about the tech’s usage at airports. The lawsuit centers on concerns that the government can use facial recognition to track our movements, and has refused to provide details about what it’s doing with the tech. To find out more, the ACLU is seeking details on the…

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White House asks Silicon Valley for AI solutions to coronavirus


White House officials called on the tech sector to help combat the coronavirus with AI in a meeting with Silicon Valley heavyweights on Wednesday. During the teleconference, US Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios previewed a new database of coronavirus-related literature that the government plans to release in the coming days, and challenged the tech community to use AI to find insights from the data. In a statement, Kratsios said: Cutting edge technology companies and major online platforms will play a critical role in this all-hands-on-deck effort. Today’s meeting outlined an initial path forward and we intend to continue this important conversation.…

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Vatican’s AI ethics plan lacks the legal restrictions it needs to be effective


Microsoft and IBM have added a divine touch to their AI ethics efforts by signing a new pledge endorsed by his holiness the Pope. The so-called “Rome Call for AI Ethics” promises to develop technologies that protect the planet and all its people by honoring six principles: transparency, inclusion, responsibility, impartiality, reliability, and security and privacy. These noble values are already common in corporate AI ethics initiatives, including Microsoft’s own. But critics argue that these programs are designed to avoid government regulation by showing that tech giants can police themselves through volunteering to follow codes of practice that they’ve come up with themselves. The…

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Eric Schmidt says big tech needs government help to keep up with China


Eric Schmidt has called on the US government to “get back in the game in a serious way” so that the country can maintain its lead over China in the AI arms race. In an op-ed for the New York Times, the former CEO of Google argued that Americans had put “too much faith in the private sector” to drive technological advances — giving China the chance to catch up. Schmidt said his time as chairman of both the National Security Commission on AI and the Defense Innovation Board had shown him how this would have “profound ramifications for our…

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Scientists propose new regulatory framework to make AI safer


Scientists from Imperial College London have proposed a new regulatory framework for assessing the impact of AI, called the Human Impact Assessment for Technology (HIAT). The researchers believe the HIAT could identify the ethical, psychological and social risks of technological progress, which are already being exposed in a growing range of applications, from voter manipulation to algorithmic sentencing. They based their idea on the Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA), which has been used to evaluate the environmental effects of proposed developments for 50 years. Like environmental impact, the human impact of AI is difficult to model and often produces unforeseen results. Software is often easy to…

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UK police are using AI to predict who could become violent criminals


Police in the UK are using AI to identify future criminals in a pilot of a system that the government wants to roll out nationwide. The system uses a machine learning algorithm to predict which low-level offenders on a database of 200,000 criminals are likely to commit “high harm” crimes in the future. Risk scoring is already used operationally to assess the probability of individuals reoffending. The new system “seeks to do so in a far more rigorous and reliable way,” reads the minutes from a 2019 meeting of the West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner’s Ethics Committee. The model is…

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