Notices by Miguel Afonso Caetano (remixtures@tldr.nettime.org), page 2

#AI #Military: "We have to ask ourselves how meaningful political discussions of AI safety are, if they don’t cover military uses of the technology. Despite the lack of evidence that AI-enabled weapons can comply with international law on distinction and proportionality, they are sold around the world. Since some of the technologies are dual use, the lines between civilian and military uses are blurring.

The decision to not regulate military AI has a human price. Even if they are systematically imprecise, these systems are often given undue trust in military contexts as they are wrongly seen as impartial. Yes, AI can help make faster military decisions, but it can also be more error prone and may fundamentally not adhere to international humanitarian law. Human control over operations is critical in legally holding actors to account."

https://www.ft.com/content/da03f8e1-0ae4-452d-acd1-ec284b6acd78

#AI #GenerativeAI #ChatBots #CallCenters: "The head of Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services has said artificial intelligence will result in “minimal” need for call centres in as soon as a year, with AI’s rapid advances set to upend a vast industry across Asia and beyond.

K Krithivasan, TCS chief executive, told the Financial Times that while “we have not seen any job reduction” so far, wider adoption of generative AI among multinational clients would overhaul the kind of customer help centres that have created mass employment in countries such as India and the Philippines.

“In an ideal phase, if you ask me, there should be very minimal incoming call centres having incoming calls at all,” he said. “We are in a situation where the technology should be able to predict a call coming and then proactively address the customer’s pain point.”"

https://www.ft.com/content/149681f0-ea71-42b0-b85b-86073354fb73

RT @danmcquillan
the whole of society is becoming a giant beta test for this idiot technology
https://engadget.com/google-will-start-showing-ai-powered-search-results-to-users-who-didnt-opt-in-093036257.html?guccounter=1

#EU #Ireland #FacialRecognition #Biometrics #Surveillance: "In seeking legislation to allow the use of facial recognition technology (FRT) in policing, Ireland risks introducing a technology that scientific evidence has demonstrated is ineffective, inherently flawed, opaque and discriminatory. Rights and civil liberties advocates across the globe have formed coalitions to warn of its dangers. If Ireland goes ahead with this controversial technology, it is a matter of time before the country finds itself in another cautionary international headline." https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2024/03/20/were-headed-for-big-problems-if-gardai-get-facial-recognition-technology/

#UK #Surveillance #PoliceState #DataProtection #Migrants: "The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has issued an enforcement notice and a warning to the Home Office for failing to sufficiently assess the privacy risks posed by the electronic monitoring of people arriving in the UK via unauthorised means.

The ICO has been in discussion with the Home Office since August 2022 on its pilot to place ankle tags on, and track the GPS location of, up to 600 migrants who arrived in the UK and were on immigration bail, after concerns about the scheme were raised by Privacy International.

The purpose of the pilot was to test whether electronic monitoring is an effective way to maintain regular contact with asylum claimants, while reducing the risk of absconding, and to establish whether it is an effective alternative to detention." https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs/2024/03/ico-finds-the-home-office-s-pilot-of-gps-electronic-monitoring-of-migrants-breached-uk-data-protection-law/

#UK #London #Subway #Surveillance #AI #Algorithms: "Thousands of people using the London Underground had their movements, behavior, and body language watched by AI surveillance software designed to see if they were committing crimes or were in unsafe situations, new documents obtained by WIRED reveal. The machine-learning software was combined with live CCTV footage to try to detect aggressive behavior and guns or knives being brandished, as well as looking for people falling onto Tube tracks or dodging fares.

From October 2022 until the end of September 2023, Transport for London (TfL), which operates the city’s Tube and bus network, tested 11 algorithms to monitor people passing through Willesden Green Tube station, in the northwest of the city. The proof of concept trial is the first time the transport body has combined AI and live video footage to generate alerts that are sent to frontline staff. More than 44,000 alerts were issued during the test, with 19,000 being delivered to station staff in real time."

https://www.wired.com/story/london-underground-ai-surveillance-documents/

#DigitalColonialism #AlgorithmicBias #BigTech -

Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back

Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry

"Large technology companies like Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet have unprecedented access to our daily lives, collecting information when we check our email, count our steps, shop online, and commute to and from work. Current events are concerning—both the changing owners (and names) of billion-dollar tech companies and regulatory concerns about artificial intelligence underscore the sweeping nature of Big Tech’s surveillance and the influence such companies hold over the people who use their apps and platforms.

As trusted tech experts Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry show in this eye-opening and convincing book, this vast accumulation of data is not the accidental stockpile of a fast-growing industry. Just as nations stole territories for ill-gotten minerals and crops, wealth, and dominance, tech companies steal personal data important to our lives. It’s only within the framework of colonialism, Mejias and Couldry argue, that we can comprehend the full scope of this heist.

Like the land grabs of the past, today’s data grab converts our data into raw material for the generation of corporate profit against our own interests. Like historical colonialism, today’s tech corporations have engineered an extractive form of doing business that builds a new social and economic order, leads to job precarity, and degrades the environment. These methods deepen global inequality, consolidating corporate wealth in the Global North and engineering discriminatory algorithms. Promising convenience, connection, and scientific progress, tech companies enrich themselves by encouraging us to relinquish details about our personal interactions, our taste in movies or music, and even our health and medical records. Do we have any other choice?"

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo216184200.html

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #OpenAI #ChatBots: "“Who are they to be speaking for all of humanity?,” asked Emily M. Bender, raising the question to the tech companies in a conversation with AIM. “The handful of very wealthy (even by American standards) tech bros are not in a position to understand the needs of humanity at large,” she bluntly argued.

The vocal, straightforward, and candid computational linguist is not exaggerating as she calls out the likes of OpenAI. Currently, Sam Altman is trying to solve issues of humanity, which include poverty, hunger, and climate catastrophes through AI tools like ChatGPT, which has been developed in Kenyan sweatshops, got sued for violating privacy laws, continues to pollute the internet and is a source of misinformation.

“I would love to see OpenAI take accountability for everything that ChatGPT says because they’re the ones putting it out there,” she said without hesitation, even though it has been long debated who should bear the blame – developers or users, when technologies backfire."

https://analyticsindiamag.com/linguist-emily-m-bender-has-a-word-or-two-about-ai/

#EU #Apple #iOS #AppleStore #Interoperability: "Apple today announced changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store impacting developers’ apps in the European Union (EU) to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The changes include more than 600 new APIs, expanded app analytics, functionality for alternative browser engines, and options for processing app payments and distributing iOS apps. Across every change, Apple is introducing new safeguards that reduce — but don’t eliminate — new risks the DMA poses to EU users. With these steps, Apple will continue to deliver the best, most secure experience possible for EU users.

The new options for processing payments and downloading apps on iOS open new avenues for malware, fraud and scams, illicit and harmful content, and other privacy and security threats. That’s why Apple is introducing protections — including Notarization for iOS apps, an authorization for marketplace developers, and disclosures on alternative payments — to reduce risks and deliver the best, most secure experience possible for users in the EU. Even with these safeguards in place, many risks remain.

Developers can learn about these changes on the Apple Developer Support page and can begin testing new capabilities today in the iOS 17.4 beta. The new capabilities will become available to users in the 27 EU countries beginning in March 2024."

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/01/apple-announces-changes-to-ios-safari-and-the-app-store-in-the-european-union/

RT @lessig
Can't quite believe this is happening, but Congress is gone so the law is not changing!

Mickey Mouse, Long a Symbol in Copyright Wars, to Enter Public Domain

https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/mickey-mouse-public-domain-disney-copyright-lawsuits-1235844322/

#Sweden #GreenColonialism #GreenTransition #FossilFuels #Decarbonization: "Across Kiruna’s region of Norrbotten, companies have staked claims here for pioneering new carbon-free ways to mine iron and make steel. They also want to dig up a rich treasure trove of rare earth elements and precious metals to help power our mobile phones and electric cars. In 2021, the region even became the prospective locale for a drastic intervention that could bring down global temperatures but could also cause cataclysmic disaster — a proposal to dim the sun.

Ebba Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister and minister for business and energy, believes northern Sweden could help reduce the speed at which the world is heating up. “Sweden really has the answer to the million-dollar question of whether it’s possible to have very high set climate goals and then at the same time have a strong economic growth,” Busch told me. “The Swedish answer to that is yes.”

There’s a prevailing sense in Kiruna that swathes of this beautiful, resource-laden land should be turned over to industry — sacrificed on the altar of a green transition in order to phase out fossil fuels. But for the region’s residents, the tradeoffs are more complex than simply embracing a more sustainable future.

Environmentalists, Indigenous groups and academics say that what politicians and energy executives are really advocating for is a technofix for the climate crisis: simply trading out one extractive industry for another without challenging the systems that got us here in the first place. And it could bring untold collateral damage upon one of nature’s last refuges in Europe (...)

In reporting this story, I met climate scientists, mining executives, Sami leaders and Swedish politicians. Among them, I found no absolute heroes or true villains. Everyone was searingly aware that the climate is in danger, but each person had drastically different ideas about how to fix it.

https://www.noemamag.com/green-colonialism/

#Degrowth #Decarbonization #Ecology #ClimateChange #Accelerarionism #Capitalism: "Yes, accelerated production of certain things is necessary to accomplish urgent social and ecological tasks (building sufficient renewable energy capacity and establishing universal public services, for instance), but these tasks are not indefinite and – unlike the objective of capitalist growth – do not require perpetually increasing production. Once necessary objectives are achieved, the level of production can be adjusted in a democratic way according to what is socially and ecologically necessary.

The power of this approach is extraordinary. Those who wish to unleash technological innovation and production to achieve ecological objectives often hitch their wagon to capitalist growth. But capitalism and growthism limit what we can achieve, for the reasons I’ve described here. Degrowth, combined with a robust public finance strategy, can enable us to overcome these limits, improve our potential for green production and innovation, and enable us to achieve rapid decarbonization."

https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/12/21/accelerationist-possibilities-in-an-ecosocialist-degrowth-scenario

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide: "A local Israeli council head suggested in a radio interview that Gaza should be “flattened completely, just like Auschwitz today,” the latest Israeli official to publicly call for the annihilation of the besieged Palestinian enclave.

David Azoulai, a political leader for the northern Israeli town of Metula, made the remark Sunday in an interview with Tel Aviv’s Radio 103FM. He went further, suggesting that Palestinians in Gaza be forcibly sent to refugee camps in Lebanon. Metula sits near the Israel-Lebanon border.

What happened on Oct. 7 is a “kind of second Holocaust,” Azoulai said, according to a translation of the interview by Haaretz. The politician said that while he is “not a far-right person,” he believes Palestinians in Gaza should be ordered to “go to the beaches,” where Israeli ships will “load them up, the civilians … the terrorists they have there, and place them on Lebanon’s shores where there are enough refugee camps.”"

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/israeli-official-gaza-flattened-auschwitz_n_658092fee4b036ecab461ec1

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide: "The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) recognises that Israel’s actions against the Palestinian people constitute an unfolding genocide. States and individuals who provide assistance to Israel are hereby rendering themselves complicit. An immediate ceasefire is imperative to save civilian lives and bring ongoing crimes to an end. The International Criminal Court is called to immediately issue arrest warrants for Israeli officials who are responsible for international crimes against Palestinians."

https://www.fidh.org/en/region/north-africa-middle-east/israel-palestine/the-unfolding-genocide-against-the-palestinians-must-stop-immediately

#SocialMedia #Twitter #AI: "Twitter is showing ads for an abusive app designed to “undress” women using artificial intelligence, in yet another sign of how horrible Twitter has become, and the type of bottom-of-the-barrel ads Elon Musk’s company is now taking on in the wake of a mass advertiser exodus.

The ad, which I got in my timeline the other day and has been screenshotted and gone viral elsewhere on the platform, shows a woman in a bikini in one image. In another, it shows an image of her with the bikini artificially removed, and a staged text conversation between a person and the woman: “do you have any more pictures like this?,” a text bubble shows below the now artificially nude photo. “Did you hack me?” the woman in the ad responds. “Delete this photo immediately!”"

https://www.404media.co/twitter-x-now-showing-ads-for-nonconsensual-ai-undress-apps/

RT @danielahanley
The public should know which companies have secret and discriminatory deals with Apple and Google to obtain preferential pricing and terms on their app stores.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/20/google-admits-spotify-pays-no-play-store-fees-because-of-a-secret-deal/

#Israel #Biden #Palestine #Gaza #HumanRights #WarCrimes #Genocide: "Biden’s effort to delegitimize the numbers coming out of Gaza as fake news has created an opening for defenders of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign to dismiss the crisis; they note that Hamas governs Gaza and therefore runs the Ministry of Health and is inflating the figures. (Biden later clarified he meant to say he didn’t trust Hamas, not all Palestinians, according to the Wall Street Journal.)

Biden’s claim was quickly rejected by human rights organizations that have been active in Gaza for years. The Associated Press noted that the Ministry of Health’s figures from previous conflicts have broadly matched the numbers arrived at by both the Israeli government and the United Nations. And the State Department itself has long considered the numbers reliable.

The Gaza Ministry of Health, meanwhile, responded by publishing a list of names of 6,747 who had died as of October 26 since the bombing campaign began, including 2,664 children. The list included 2,665 children, but The Intercept found that one 14-year-old boy was listed twice, bringing its total down to 6,746. Otherwise the list does not contain duplicates."

https://theintercept.com/2023/10/31/gaza-death-palestine-health-ministry/?utm_campaign=theintercept&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

#AI #ComputerVision #Surveillance #Patents #IP: "A rapidly growing number of voices argue that AI research, and computer vision in particular, is powering mass surveillance. Yet the direct path from computer vision research to surveillance has remained obscured and difficult to assess. Here, we reveal the Surveillance AI pipeline by analyzing three decades of computer vision research papers and downstream patents, more than 40,000 documents. We find the large majority of annotated computer vision papers and patents self-report their technology enables extracting data about humans. Moreover, the majority of these technologies specifically enable extracting data about human bodies and body parts. We present both quantitative and rich qualitative analysis illuminating these practices of human data extraction. Studying the roots of this pipeline, we find that institutions that prolifically produce computer vision research, namely elite universities and "big tech" corporations, are subsequently cited in thousands of surveillance patents. Further, we find consistent evidence against the narrative that only these few rogue entities are contributing to surveillance. Rather, we expose the fieldwide norm that when an institution, nation, or subfield authors computer vision papers with downstream patents, the majority of these papers are used in surveillance patents. In total, we find the number of papers with downstream surveillance patents increased more than five-fold between the 1990s and the 2010s, with computer vision research now having been used in more than 11,000 surveillance patents. Finally, in addition to the high levels of surveillance we find documented in computer vision papers and patents, we unearth pervasive patterns of documents using language that obfuscates the extent of surveillance. Our analysis reveals the pipeline by which computer vision research has powered the ongoing expansion of surveillance."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15084

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Hype #AIPolicy #UK: “1. Large language models contain foundational flaws which mean they are unable to live up to the hype and make it likely that the current bubble will burst. They will continue to require vast amounts of invisibilised labour to produce, but will not result in any form of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

2. The greatest risk is that large language models act as a form of ‘shock doctrine’, where the sense of world-changing urgency that accompanies them is used to transform social systems without democratic debate.

3. The AI White Paper promotes populist narratives about AI adoption that align with the hype around large language models while offering a fairly thin evidence base. Ongoing developments in UK policy, such as the upcoming summit, cite notions of existential threat while ignoring the more mundane risks of social and environmental harms.

4. The narrative around open source AI is a complete red herring. The way ‘open’ can be applied to large language models doesn’t level the playing field, make the models more secure or challenge the centralisation of control.

5. UK regulators are not well placed to address the issues raised by large language models because these systems operate across sectors and technical, economic and social registers while establishing unpredictable feedback loops between them. Meanwhile the AI industry is already engaged in significant lobbying at the EU which has proven sufficient to dissolve regulatory red lines.

6. Additional options for regulation draw on frameworks like post-normal science to mandate an extended peer community and the inclusion of previously marginalised perspectives. This more grounded approach has a better chance of resulting in AI that is more socially productive, where regulators are supported by distributed and adaptive ‘councils on AI’”

https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/124038/pdf/

Se o governo deste país fosse realmente SOCIALISTA, haveria certamente muito maior investimento PÚBLICO num bem PÚBLICO como a CIÊNCIA. É preciso ser muito estúpido e/ou teimoso para não admitir isso...

#Portugal #Ciência #UE: "Investimento público de Portugal em I&D em 2022 foi equivalente a 0,34% do PIB, traduzindo um declínio de 0,1 pontos percentuais face a 2012. No "ranking" da UE só há seis países com uma percentagem inferior.

Portugal figura na cauda da União Europeia (UE) no que toca ao investimento público em investigação e desenvolvimento (I&D), com o gasto por habitante a ser 70,5% inferior à média dos 27."

https://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/economia/detalhe/portugal-investe-70-menos-do-que-a-media-da-ue-em-investigacao-e-desenvolvimento