Toxic tech?

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This morning’s Observer column:

The headline above an essay in a magazine published by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) caught my eye. “Facial recognition is the plutonium of AI”, it said. Since plutonium – a by-product of uranium-based nuclear power generation – is one of the most toxic materials known to humankind, this seemed like an alarmist metaphor, so I settled down to read.

The article, by a Microsoft researcher, Luke Stark, argues that facial-recognition technology – one of the current obsessions of the tech industry – is potentially so toxic for the health of human society that it should be treated like plutonium and restricted accordingly. You could spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley before you heard sentiments like these about a technology that enables computers to recognise faces in a photograph or from a camera…

Read on

Quote of the day

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”The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.”

Peter Mair, Ruling the Void

As she used to be

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From a National Geographic photograph by Eric Kruszewski.

Source

It’s not all bad news. The wonderful (and, sadly, late) Andrew Fallon made an intensive and comprehensive laser-scan of the entire building some years ago. Alexis Madrigal tells the story here. So a reference blueprint (should that be dataprint?) exists from which restorers can work.

Quote of the day

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“Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment,” he said. “The owners of the platform giants consider themselves the masters of the universe, but in fact they are slaves to preserving their dominant position … Davos is a good place to announce that their days are numbered.”

George Soros, Davos, January 25, 2018

Ben Evans on the DCMS White Paper on Online Harms

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From Ben’s weekly newsletter:

The Uk government has released a ‘White Paper’ (consultation prior to legislation) covering the management and take-down of harmful content on social platforms. The idea is to have a list of specific and clearly defined kind of harmful content (child exploitation, promoting terrorism, etc), an obligation on anyone hosting content to have a reasonable and systematic process for finding and removing this, and a penalty regime that is proportionate to the kind of harm (child exploitation is worst), how hard they’d tried to deal with it (the ‘reasonableness’ test), and how big the company is (startups get more leeway on less harmful stuff), with a regulatory body to manage and adjudicate this. The UK attitude is “this is how everything else is regulated, so why should online be any different?” The broader point: FB and Google etc are not in China, but more and more economies where they are present and have to remain will start passing laws, and some of them will mean their global operations might have to change – there will be a lowest common denominator effect. This one tries not to be too prescriptive and tries not to harm startups, but GDPR was the opposite. And, of course, absolutely no-one in the UK (or anywhere else) cares what American lawyers think the American constitution says.

The Brexit trilemma

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Nice analysis of this by Emily Jones and Calum Miller of the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford. Summary:

The country’s leaders need to accept that the primary objectives of Brexit are, and always have been, mutually incompatible. Sadly, their refusal to acknowledge this is indicative of the kind of leadership that led to the current impasse.

With the European Union’s latest extension of the United Kingdom’s membership in the bloc, onlookers around the world are right to wonder why the Brexit process has proved so intractable. The short answer is that the UK’s government and parliament are trying to achieve three incompatible goals: preserving the country’s territorial integrity, preventing the return of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and enabling the UK to strike its own trade deals.

The British are finally confronting the fact that only two of these objectives can be met at any one time. This implies that there are three basic scenarios for moving ahead with Brexit…

Worth reading in full.