Privacy activists are winning fights with tech giants. Why does victory feel hollow?; The Guardian, May 15, 2021

Evgeny Morozov, The Guardian; Privacy activists are winning fights with tech giants. Why does victory feel hollow?

"Something similar is likely to happen in other domains marked by recent moral panics over digital technologies. The tech industry will address mounting public anxieties over fake news and digital addiction by doubling down on what I call “solutionism”, with digital platforms mobilizing new technologies to offer their users a bespoke, secure and completely controllable experience...

What we want is something genuinely new: an institution that will know what parts of existing laws and regulations to suspend – like the library does with intellectual property law, for example – in order to fully leverage the potential inherent in digital technologies in the name of great public good."

Balancing Privacy With Data Sharing for the Public Good; The New York Times, February 19, 2021

 David Deming, The New York Times; Balancing Privacy With Data Sharing for the Public Good

"Governments and technology companies are increasingly collecting vast amounts of personal data, prompting new laws, myriad investigations and calls for stricter regulation to protect individual privacy.

Yet despite these issues, economics tells us that society needs more data sharing rather than less, because the benefits of publicly available data often outweigh the costs. Public access to sensitive health records sped up the development of lifesaving medical treatments like the messenger-RNA coronavirus vaccinesproduced by Moderna and Pfizer. Better economic data could vastly improve policy responses to the next crisis."

Making a path to ethical, socially-beneficial artificial intelligence, MIT News, March 5, 2019

School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, MIT News; Making a path to ethical, socially-beneficial artificial intelligence

Leaders from government, philanthropy, academia, and industry say collaboration is key to make sure artificial intelligence serves the public good.

"Many speakers at the three-day celebration, which was held on Feb. 26-28, called for an approach to education, research, and tool-making that combines collective knowledge from the technology, humanities, arts, and social science fields, throwing the double-edged promise of the new machine age into stark relief...

The final panel was “Computing for the People: Ethics and AI,” moderated by New York Timescolumnist Thomas Friedman. In a conversation afterward, Nobles also emphasized that the goal of the new college is to advance computation and to give all students a greater “awareness of the larger political, social context in which we’re all living.” That is the MIT vision for developing “bilinguals” — engineers, scholars, professionals, civic leaders, and policymakers who have both superb technical expertise and an understanding of complex societal issues gained from study in the humanities, arts, and social science fields.  

The perils of speed and limited perspective
 
The five panelists on “Computing for the People” — representing industry, academia, government, and philanthropy — contributed particulars to the vision of a society infused with those bilinguals, and attested to the perils posed by an overly-swift integration of advanced computing into all domains of modern existence.
 
"I think of AI as jetpacks and blindfolds that will send us careening in whatever direction we're already headed," said Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab. "It's going to make us more powerful but not necessarily more wise."

The key problem, according to Ito, is that machine learning and AI have to date been exclusively the province of engineers, who tend to talk only with each other. This means they can deny accountability when their work proves socially, politically, or economically destructive. "Asked to explain their code, technological people say: ‘We're just technical people, we don't deal with racial or political problems,’" Ito said."