by Admin | May 20, 2024 | News
I was drafting a little Four Pillars article on some statements and proclamations made over the week, but a notable event just had to happen in the Middle East again.
Not to make a mockery of a death, but Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi is confirmed dead following a helicopter crash in the middle of thick fog and mountainous regions. The helicopter also carried the foreign minister and some other staffers and officials. While conspiracies may fly, it can be assumed that this was more likely an incident than sabotage – it does not take much to see how a helicopter could fail to function in bad weather conditions and through risky terrains. If foul play was likely, it would be allowing the helicopter to take off, and allowing multiple officials to board that craft too. If I were a world leader, I would never get in helicopters ever. Although he was more of a mouthpiece of the hardliners than a power broker, Raisi was also the heir apparent to Khamenei, the current Ayatollah of Iran, and these deaths can throw Iranian politics in flux due to the sheer number of top officials lost, but it is unclear what direction the government will take from here.
The tariffs the Biden administration was reportedly imposing on China, most importantly on Chinese EVs, was officially announced earlier this week – to some controversy. It seems that the EU, another of the Pillars, is debating following the same route against China that the US has taken. It may be unwise economically to engage in a trade war, but it is necessary to not allow CCP-subsidized exports to dominate a market in the Pillars – especially in automobiles, as that gives the CCP a leverage over the Pillars when it comes to, say the South China Sea or Taiwan.
In Europe, while Ukraine was able to repel the Russian incursion into Kharkiv last week, members in NATO’s eastern flank continue to raise alarms about the potential need for them to deploy troops within Ukraine. Estonia has made such an announcement, and countries like Poland may follow too. Possibilities of NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine seems to increase every week, even if only marginally.
Articles of the week – China Has Gotten the Trade War It Deserves [Michael Schulman, The Atlantic] and (Japanese-language article) The Other Quad (Noburu Okabe, Sankei Shimbun)
AP: In this photo provided by Islamic Republic News Agency, IRNA, the helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi takes off at the Iranian border with Azerbaijan after President Raisi and his Azeri counterpart Ilham Aliyev inaugurated dam of Qiz Qalasi, or Castel of Girl in Azeri, Iran, Sunday, May 19, 2024. (Ali Hamed Haghdoust/IRNA via AP)
Minh Nguyen is the Chief Editor of the Boston Global Forum and a Shinzo Abe Initiative Fellow. She writes the Four Pillars column in the BGF Weekly newsletter.
by Admin | May 20, 2024 | News
Before the conference to honor Dr. Alondra Nelson with 2024 World Leader in AIWS on April 30, BGF Chief Editor Minh Nguyen interviewed Dr. Nelson. Watch the full conversation on YouTube.
“Science and technology policy affects everything.”
When I threw an icebreaker question to Dr. Alondra Nelson in our conversation, I did not realize her response would encapsulate her governance philosophy so well. It may sound like a very obvious remark, but contained within is an insight that unfortunately not all lawmakers across the world understand.
This hidden importance of science and technology governance was the underpinning current carrying our conversation on April 30.
Nelson already knew she was foraying into policymaking and governance, as her appointment to the OSTP was already announced by the then-President-elect Biden in Delaware. This was the first time she would be involved in policy making.
But we were not not there to talk about public health or epidemiology, as vital as that field is, AIWS after stands for Artificial Intelligence World Society – and Nelson’s most renowned expertises were technology, AI, and society. In fact, one of the reasons she was appointed to the OSTP was due her possession of insights into the intersections of the aforementioned fields.
As deputy director, she had already begun advocating heavily for a framework on AI that would protect democratic principles, but a turnover at the office created an opening to turn her idea into reality. Nelson was appointed acting director after her predecessor’s resignation, but she was not there to be a lame duck. The AI Bill of Rights, which she had already envisioned in a Wired magazine op-ed in 2021, was finally put together and published in early October 2022. Although she did not express it verbally that day, one could tell that Nelson is extremely proud (and deservedly so!) of bringing the framework to the public. It was one of the first guidelines on AI governance and its impact vis-a-vis society and democracy issued by the government.
Perhaps interestingly, this framework was published a month before OpenAI released ChatGPT for public consumption and that phenomenon took the public debate and discourse by storm.
While her tenure was a short one, Nelson was firm in her belief that she had fulfilled her vision and stood proud of her achievements at the OSTP, as aforementioned. In fact, many of the guidance established during her leadership were beginning to get implemented in federal departments – the foundations she laid out are starting to come to fruition. The Boston Global Forum would agree with her self-assessment, as she was honored with the World Leader in AIWS Award for her work as deputy and acting director of the OSTP.
As scientists know though, both social and material, that progress can’t just be measured in years, but rather decades and even longer. At time of writing, the AI Bill of Rights was issued only two years ago. When I asked what she hope would become of the foundations her and the Biden administration planted this term, she wish that their AI policies will ultimate harness the power of AI in helping global issues in health and climate change, but still mitigate the externalities and harms that are already impacting livelihoods, such as racial bias in facial recognition or disempowerment of workers.
Even if she returned to academia after her time at the OSTP concluded, Nelson remains deeply involved in AI governance and policymaking. Rather than working for the White House, she was appointed to be the US Representative to the UN High Level Advisory Board, effectively switching DC for New York.
While working in this space, Nelson founded areas of potential cooperations for global AI governance – that “fundamentally, across different kinds of economic systems, political systems, political ideologies, when you’re thinking about AI, emerging technologies, I think what people agree on, and certainly in the US in a bipartisan way is they want the benefits of these technologies and they want to mitigate the harms,” she explained to me. Even though there are differing visions or geopolitical rivalries amongst member-states, this baseline of common understanding and aspiration can help bridge gaps of political divide and mistrust into a true global AI governance framework. In essence, the foundation of common humanity should be channeled into these global initiatives, Dr. Nelson believed. A desire for a common global framework is no less what one expects from a scientist.
These technologies do not inherently drive themselves toward an ethical or moral direction, but effective tech public policy and governmental guidance have the potential to enhance livelihood. In an era where the debate is dominated and polarized by opinions of AI doomerism and accelerationism, Dr. Nelson frames a third way: the synthesis to guide these technological and AI developments toward moral and ethical outcomes for society. One should not have to fear new technologies or AI, but civil society and government still need to mitigate their harms, for that could have disastrous consequences as well on the public and democracy. I recall a short exchange we had towards the end of our conversation:
MN: “From technology and science policy comes progress.“
AN: “Yes, sometimes.”
MN: “Hopefully, most of the time, that’s where we try to get.”
AN: “That’s where we’re at, got to go at. That’s what policy does, right? They steer towards this direction rather than that direction.”
After all, science and technology policies affect everything.
BGF Chief Editor Minh Nguyen and Dr. Alondra Nelson
by Admin | May 20, 2024 | News
This is an excerpt of the article originally published in ScienceAlert.
You probably know to take everything an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot says with a grain of salt, since they are often just scraping data indiscriminately, without the nous to determine its veracity.
But there may be reason to be even more cautious. Many AI systems, new research has found, have already developed the ability to deliberately present a human user with false information. These devious bots have mastered the art of deception.
“AI developers do not have a confident understanding of what causes undesirable AI behaviors like deception,” says mathematician and cognitive scientist Peter Park of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
“But generally speaking, we think AI deception arises because a deception-based strategy turned out to be the best way to perform well at the given AI’s training task. Deception helps them achieve their goals.”
One arena in which AI systems are proving particularly deft at dirty falsehoods is gaming. There are three notable examples in the researchers’ work. One is Meta’s CICERO, designed to play the board game Diplomacy, in which players seek world domination through negotiation. Meta intended its bot to be helpful and honest; in fact, the opposite was the case.
by Admin | Apr 21, 2022 | Executive Board
Francesco Lapenta is the Founding Director of the John Cabot University Institute of Future and Innovation Studies. Currently, he is also a Mozilla-Ford Research Fellow. and the Technical Editor of the I.E.E.E. P7006 standard on Personal Data Artificial Intelligence Agents. His research focuses on emerging technologies, innovation, technologies’ governance, and standardization processes, ethics and impact assessment, and future scenario analysis.
He holds a Ph.D. In Sociology from the University of London, joint supervision Goldsmiths College and the London School of Economics. The Ph.D. was awarded a research grant by the E.S.R.C. (Economic and Social Research Council, UK). He has worked as Associate Professor in New Media Studies and Business Innovation at the Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies at RUC University, Denmark (2009-2019), and Assistant Professor (2007-2009). Visiting Professor at New York University (2011-2012) and John Cabot University (2019).
He has organized many international conferences in the United States, Latin America, and Europe and participated in, and organized, countless academic and public events worldwide influencing the debate on emerging technologies. He has for years served on the executive board of the IVSA association. His latest works include the influential books: Research Methods in Service Innovation (F. Lapenta and F. Sørensen, Elgar 2017)), in which he explores the use of future-oriented scenario analysis for technology and innovation research. The 2016 book Data Ethics – The New Competitive Advantage by G. Hasselbalch and P. Tranberg (editor: F. Lapenta, Publishare) was one of the first books to describe the concept and establish privacy and the right to control one’s own data as key positive legal and business parameters. In 2011 he published Locative Media and the Digital Visualization of Space, Place, and Information, (Lapenta Ed. Taylor and Francis).
Prof. Lapenta has been teaching courses and seminars in Business and Information Technologies, Digital Rights and Media Ethics, New Media Studies, Advanced Media Based Research Methods, Ethics and Impact Assessment of Emerging Technologies. He has supervised countless student-industry collaborative projects. as part of his Master’s courses.
by Admin | Nov 17, 2019 | Executive Board
Member of AIWS Standards and Practice Committee, Michael Dukakis Institute
Former Prime Minister of Peru
Beatriz Merino was the first female Prime Minister of Peru. She held office between June 23, 2003 and December 12, 2003. Before serving as Prime Minister, she graduated from Harvard with a Master’s degree in law and had a successful career at Procter & Gamble. After her time at Procter & Gamble, she was elected as Senator from 1990-1992 and Congresswoman from 1995- 2000. During that time she served as President of the Environmental Committee and the Women’s Rights Committee.
Merino is widely recognized for her expertise and work with women’s issues. She was the Director of the Women’s Leadership Program, now known as Gender Equality in Development Unit, at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington D.C. which aims to support and finance projects to enhance women’s leadership in Latin America. She was also a member of the board of directors for the International Women Forum and a steering committee member for the Business Women’s Initiative against HIV/AIDS. Merino also worked extensively in commercial, labor, corporate, and environmental legislation. She was the first Peruvian woman to serve on the Commission of Andean Jurists. At Lima University, she was the Director of Foreign Cooperation and of the Master’s program on tax revenue and fiscal policies.
She has authored two books, “Peruvian Women in the XX Century Legislation” and “Marriage and Rape: Debate of Article 178 of the Peruvian Criminal Code.” She served as Peru’s public ombudsman from September 2005 until March 2011.
She is honored as Women Political Leaders Trailblazer Award 2019.
