C-Level View | Feature:
Technology Change: Closing the Knowledge Gap — A Q&A with Mary Grush & Daniel Christian
Excerpts:
Technology changes quickly. People change slowly. The rate of technology change often outpaces our ability to understand it.
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It has caused a gap between what’s possible and what’s legal. For example, facial recognition seems to be starting to show up all around us — that’s what’s possible. But what’s legal?
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The overarching questions are: What do we really want from these technologies? What kind of future do we want to live in?
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Those law schools that expand their understanding of emerging technologies and lead the field in the exploration of related legal issues will achieve greater national prominence.Daniel Christian
UIX: When the future comes to West Michigan, will we be ready? — from rapidgrowthmedia.com by Matthew Russell
Excerpts (emphasis DSC):
“Here in the United States, if we were to personify things a bit, it’s almost like society is anxiously calling out to an older sibling (i.e., emerging technologies), ‘Heh! Wait up!!!'” Christian says. “This trend has numerous ramifications.”
Out of those ramifications, Christian names three main points that society will have to address to fully understand, make use of, and make practical, future technologies.
Photos by Adam Bird
From DSC:
The key thing that I was trying to relay in my contribution towards Matthew’s helpful article was that we are now on an exponential trajectory of technological change. This trend has ramifications for numerous societies around the globe, and it involves the legal realm as well. Hopefully, all of us in the workforce are coming to realize our need to be constantly pulse-checking the relevant landscapes around us. To help make that happen, each of us needs to be tapping into the appropriate “streams of content” that are relevant to our careers so that our knowledgebases are as up-to-date as possible. We’re all into lifelong learning now, right?
Along these lines, increasingly there is a need for futurism to hit the mainstream. That is, when the world is moving at 120+mph, the skills and methods that futurists follow must be better taught and understood, or many people will be broadsided by the changes brought about by emerging technologies. We need to better pulse-check the relevant landscapes, anticipate the oncoming changes, develop potential scenarios, and then design the strategies to respond to those potential scenarios.
The world is changing. Here’s how companies must adapt. — from weforum.org by Joe Kaeser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Siemens AG
Excerpts (emphasis DSC):
Although we have only seen the beginning, one thing is already clear: the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the greatest transformation human civilization has ever known. As far-reaching as the previous industrial revolutions were, they never set free such enormous transformative power.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is transforming practically every human activity...its scope, speed and reach are unprecedented.
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Enormous power (Insert from DSC: What I was trying to get at here) entails enormous risk. Yes, the stakes are high.
“And make no mistake about it: we are now writing the code that will shape our collective future.” CEO of Siemens AG
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Contrary to Milton Friedman’s maxim, the business of business should not just be business. Shareholder value alone should not be the yardstick. Instead, we should make stakeholder value, or better yet, social value, the benchmark for a company’s performance.
Today, stakeholders…rightfully expect companies to assume greater social responsibility, for example, by protecting the climate, fighting for social justice, aiding refugees, and training and educating workers. The business of business should be to create value for society.
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This seamless integration of the virtual and the physical worlds in so-called cyber-physical systems – that is the giant leap we see today. It eclipses everything that has happened in industry so far. As in previous industrial revolutions but on a much larger scale, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will eliminate millions of jobs and create millions of new jobs.
“…because the Fourth Industrial Revolution runs on knowledge, we need a concurrent revolution in training and education.
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If the workforce doesn’t keep up with advances in knowledge throughout their lives, how will the millions of new jobs be filled?”Joe Kaeser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Siemens AG
From DSC:
At least three critically important things jump out at me here:
What freedoms and rights should individuals have in the digital age?
Joe Kaeser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Siemens AG
Facial recognition has to be regulated to protect the public, says AI report — from technologyreview.com by Will Knight
The research institute AI Now has identified facial recognition as a key challenge for society and policymakers—but is it too late?
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Artificial intelligence has made major strides in the past few years, but those rapid advances are now raising some big ethical conundrums.
Chief among them is the way machine learning can identify people’s faces in photos and video footage with great accuracy. This might let you unlock your phone with a smile, but it also means that governments and big corporations have been given a powerful new surveillance tool.
A new report from the AI Now Institute (large PDF), an influential research institute based in New York, has just identified facial recognition as a key challenge for society and policymakers.
Also see:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
At the core of the cascading scandals around AI in 2018 are questions of accountability: who is responsible when AI systems harm us? How do we understand these harms, and how do we remedy them? Where are the points of intervention, and what additional research and regulation is needed to ensure those interventions are effective? Currently there are few answers to these questions, and the frameworks presently governing AI are not capable of ensuring accountability. As the pervasiveness, complexity, and scale of these systems grow, the lack of meaningful accountability and oversight – including basic safeguards of responsibility, liability, and due process – is an increasingly urgent concern.
Building on our 2016 and 2017 reports, the AI Now 2018 Report contends with this central
problem and addresses the following key issues:
Within each topic, we identify emerging challenges and new research, and provide recommendations regarding AI development, deployment, and regulation. We offer practical pathways informed by research so that policymakers, the public, and technologists can better understand and mitigate risks. Given that the AI Now Institute’s location and regional expertise is concentrated in the U.S., this report will focus primarily on the U.S. context, which is also where several of the world’s largest AI companies are based.
From DSC:
As I said in this posting, we need to be aware of the emerging technologies around us. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. People need to be aware of — and involved with — which emerging technologies get rolled out (or not) and/or which features are beneficial to roll out (or not).
One of the things that’s beginning to alarm me these days is how the United States has turned over the keys to the Maserati — i.e., think an expensive, powerful thing — to youth who lack the life experiences to know how to handle such power and, often, the proper respect for such power. Many of these youthful members of our society don’t own the responsibility for the positive and negative influences and impacts that such powerful technologies can have (and the more senior execs have not taken enough responsibility either)!
If you owned the car below, would you turn the keys of this ~$137,000+ car over to your 16-25 year old? Yet that’s what America has been doing for years. And, in some areas, we’re now paying the price.
The corporate world continues to discard the hard-earned experience that age brings…as they shove older people out of the workforce. (I hesitate to use the word wisdom…but in some cases, that’s also relevant/involved here.) Then we, as a society, sit back and wonder how did we get to this place?
Even technologists and programmers in their 20’s and 30’s are beginning to step back and ask…WHY did we develop this application or that feature? Was it — is it — good for society? Is it beneficial? Or should it be tabled or revised into something else?
Below is but one example — though I don’t mean to pick on Microsoft, as they likely have more older workers than the Facebooks, Googles, or Amazons of the world. I fully realize that all of these companies have some older employees. But the youth-oriented culture in American today has almost become an obsession — and not just in the tech world. Turn on the TV, check out the new releases on Netflix, go see a movie in a theater, listen to the radio, cast but a glance at the magazines in the check out lines, etc. and you’ll instantly know
what I mean.
In the workplace, there appears to be a bias against older employees as being less innovative or tech-savvy — such a perspective is often completely incorrect. Go check out LinkedIn for items re: age discrimination…it’s a very real thing. But many of us over the age of 30 know this to be true if we’ve lost a job in the last decade or two and have tried to get a job that involves technology.
Microsoft argues facial-recognition tech could violate your rights — from finance.yahoo.com by Rob Pegoraro
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union provided a good reason for us to think carefully about the evolution of facial-recognition technology. In a study, the group used Amazon’s (AMZN) Rekognition service to compare portraits of members of Congress to 25,000 arrest mugshots. The result: 28 members were mistakenly matched with 28 suspects.
The ACLU isn’t the only group raising the alarm about the technology. Earlier this month, Microsoft (MSFT) president Brad Smith posted an unusual plea on the company’s blog asking that the development of facial-recognition systems not be left up to tech companies.
Saying that the tech “raises issues that go to the heart of fundamental human rights protections like privacy and freedom of expression,” Smith called for “a government initiative to regulate the proper use of facial recognition technology, informed first by a bipartisan and expert commission.”
But we may not get new laws anytime soon.
