News — At The Edge — 7/6
Clearly civilization is on a collision course — stupid humans, inequality, panoptic surveillance — with both machines and authoritarian governments, but the machine may be the more humane.
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Stupid Humans —
“[I]n a way that no scientist, philosopher or scholar has yet adequately explained, we appear to have the capacity to understand and recognize the nature of our existence, and of the deeper mechanics of the world [but]…do we grab onto every moment…of our lives and gorge on the banquet of knowledge and meaning staring us in the face?….
Nope. Not really….We make too many humans, we don’t feed each other properly…we argue, we wage war, and we willfully deny so much of reality — we make ignorance into a vocation….
All of our brilliance and cognitive exceptionalism on this planet must actually be at the remedial end of the cosmic scale of possibility. Whatever we think high intelligence is…just wrong…and we’re not even good enough to imagine what that really looks like….
The one tiny glimmer of possibility I can see is in our machines. If there is a way to enable our algorithms and so-called AIs to not learn like us…to seek out a different path entirely in the landscape, to build themselves…[and] ignore our blueprints and schemes….Then, maybe, it will do the thing we never could: make us into something better.” https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/stupid-humans/
Rich get richer, everyone else not so much in record U.S. expansion-
“[T]he longest U.S. economic expansion in history…best characterized by…an ever-widening chasm between the unfathomably rich and everyone else…[as] signs of a new Gilded Age are all over….
The number of billionaires in the United States has more than doubled in the last decade..[as] wealthiest fifth of Americans hold 88% of the country’s wealth, a share that has grown since before the crisis….
Meanwhile, the number of people receiving federal food stamps tops 39 million…up 40% from 2008 even though the country’s population has only grown about 8%…..
[Rents] have risen twice as fast as wages…[and] number of homeless people sleeping in the city’s shelters is 70% higher than a decade ago….
[Anger] has bubbled into the country’s politics…[as] underwhelming gains made by low-income people in the last decade are fragile and that people only recently brought into the workforce could be the first fired when a recession hits.” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-expansion-contrasts/rich-get-richer-everyone-else-not-so-much-in-record-u-s-expansion-idUSKCN1TX0HE
Supreme Court ditches fairness, voter rights and the Constitution in gerrymandering ruling —
“[Decision] means politicians are free to maximize party power and skew elections with…rigged districts…[so] politicians choose their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians…[and] stripped of their voice in Washington by power-hungry politicians….
[Judges] acknowledged in oral arguments the damage done to our democracy by extreme partisan gerrymandering, and three lower courts have found clear legal standards to evaluate allegations of partisan gerrymandering. Yet the five justices…concluded that the court could not set a constitutional standard to prevent [it]….
The citizen-driven push for independent redistricting commissions with partisan balance is gathering momentum nationwide….
Court decision is part of a disturbing pattern of 5–4 rulings…[that] undercut or eviscerated landmark reforms passed by Congress to protect the integrity of our democracy…[including] Voting Rights Act…shredded campaign contribution limits…and opened our elections to unlimited spending by outside groups (much of it undisclosed)…[now] condoned extreme partisan gerrymandering…[all] in direct defiance of democratic principles….
[It] ‘deprived citizens of…their constitutional rights…to choose their political representatives’…[for] politicians to prioritize themselves while neglecting…everyday Americans.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/06/27/supreme-court-gerrymandering-ditches-fairness-voters-constitution-column/1513082001/
Europe should ban AI for mass surveillance and social credit scoring, says advisory group —
“An independent expert group tasked with…ensuring AI developments are ‘human centric’…[has] warnings on the use of AI for mass surveillance and scoring of EU citizens, such as China’s social credit system…[and] urges governments to commit to not engage in blanket surveillance of populations for national security purposes….
- ’Governments should commit…to deploy and procure only Trustworthy AI systems, designed to be respectful of the law and fundamental rights’…[because of] the potency and potential for misuse of AI technologies…[and] adtech’s mass-scale processing of web users’ personal data for targeting ads….
- [Need] technology solutions to provide individuals with information and control over how their data is being used…and develop standards for secure data exchange based on personal data control’….
- AI systems which interact with humans should include a mandatory self-identification…[so] bot would have to introduce itself up front…giving the human…a chance to disengage….
- Children should be ensured a free and unmonitored space of development and upon moving into adulthood should be provided with a ‘clean slate’ of any public or private storage of data related to them….
- [EU] should also devise ways to continuously ‘analyze, measure and score the societal impact of AI’…[with] mechanism to ensure that the information generated is trusted, of high and verifiable quality….
- [A]n EU-wide data repository ‘through common annotation and standardization’ — to work against data siloing….
- [Also] restricting the development of automated lethal weapons — including…cyber-attack tools which…‘can have lethal consequences if deployed….
- [Finally] refrain from giving AI systems or robots legal personhood…a significant moral hazard.’” https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/26/europe-should-ban-ai-for-mass-surveillance-and-social-credit-scoring-says-advisory-group/
US military laser can identify people by their heartbeats from 650 feet away —
“[Laser’s] able to penetrate clothing and achieve a positive identification roughly 95 percent of the time…[and] ‘longer ranges should be possible’….
[The] device can’t penetrate thick clothing and the person must be sitting or standing in one place for it to work. It takes about 30 seconds to get a reading….
[A] person’s cardiac signature cannot be modified as a person’s face or fingerprints can.” https://www.businessinsider.com/this-us-military-laser-can-identify-people-by-their-heartbeats-2019-6
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Doc Huston
