AI’s abilities to conduct profiling and automate decision-making – as well as its other uses – threaten myriad human rights. It can affect the “rights to health, education, freedom of movement, freedom of peaceful assembly and association, and freedom of expression,” the UN human rights office warned.
Category Archives: privacy
Wearable Computers Should Never Have Cameras
Zoom dysmorphia is following us into the real world
NATIONAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE INITIATIVE
Welcome to AI.gov, home of the National AI Initiative and connection point to ongoing activities to advance U.S. leadership in AI. The National AI Initiative Act of 2020 became law on January 1, 2021, providing for a coordinated program across the entire Federal government to accelerate AI research and application for the Nation’s economic prosperity and national security. The mission of the National AI Initiative is to ensure continued U.S. leadership in AI research and development, lead the world in the development and use of trustworthy AI in the public and private sectors, and prepare the present and future U.S. workforce for the integration of AI systems across all sectors of the economy and society. https://www.ai.gov/
Deepfakes and the future they can distort
The Googleplex of the Future Has Privacy Robots, Meeting Tents and Your Very Own Balloon Wall
In 2018, Google’s real estate group began to consider what it could do differently. It turned to the company’s research and development team for “built environments.” It was an eclectic group of architects, industrial and interior designers, structural engineers, builders and tech specialists led by Michelle Kaufmann, who worked with the renowned architect Frank Gehry before joining Google a decade ago.
Google focused on three trends: Work happens anywhere and not just in the office; what employees need from a workplace is changing constantly; and workplaces need to be more than desks, meeting rooms and amenities.
“The future of work that we thought was 10 years out,” Ms. Kaufmann said, “Covid brought us to that future now.” Read more (NY Times)
The Promise and the Peril of Virtual Health Care
During the coronavirus pandemic, telemedicine looks like the future of health care. Is it a future that we want? Read more (New Yorker)
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
We rushed to the internet expecting empowerment, the democratization of knowledge, and help with real problems, but surveillance capitalism really was just too lucrative to resist. This economic logic has now spread beyond the tech companies to new surveillance–based ecosystems in virtually every economic sector, from insurance to automobiles to health, education, finance, to every product described as “smart” and every service described as “personalized.” Read more (Harvard Gazette)
Biometric Checkout Comes to Hotel Convenience Store
Koyo Group teamed with checkout-free tech provider Zippin and Fujitsu in the development of the Green Leaves + store, which is located within the Yokohama Techno Tower Hotel. Shoppers can enter the store, which sells prepackaged food and beverages and fresh bento box meals, via a QR code in a smartphone app once they’ve entered their credit card information. The app also uses multi-biometric authentication technology and facial recognition to links their palm vein; once this has been registered, they can simply swipe their palm to enter the store and no longer need the phone. Read more (RIS)
A plan to redesign the internet could make apps that no one controls
Dfinity wants to allow the creation of apps that can run on the network itself rather than on servers owned by Facebook, Google or Amazon. Can it succeed where others have failed? Read more (Technology Review)
