Four short links: 10 January 2018
Attention Arms Race, Robot/AI Principles, GDPR vs. Ad Tech, and Meltdown Code
- The Arms Race for Your Attention (Cory Doctorow) — today’s weaponized attention is tomorrow’s ghost ad I’ve been banging on about this for a while: anything designed to catch our attention only works while it’s novel because we’re designed to “tune out” familiar things. But history is littered with armies of seemingly invincible attention warriors who were out-evolved by their prey, and could not overcome the countermeasures that were begat by repeated exposure to their once-undefeatable tactics.
- A Roundup of Robotics and AI Ethics: Part 1, Principles (RoboHub) — we started with Asimov’s three, and people have been working on them ever since. Bloat is obviously a problem: there are 23 Asilomar Principles. I like IEEE’s: How can we ensure that A/IS do not infringe human rights? Traditional metrics of prosperity do not take into account the full effect of A/IS technologies on human well-being. How can we assure that designers, manufacturers, owners and operators of A/IS are responsible and accountable? How can we ensure that A/IS are transparent? How can we extend the benefits and minimize the risks of AI/AS technology being misused?
- EU Data Protection Directive Requires A Top-To-Bottom Redo of the Ad Tech Industry (Cory Doctorow) — Under the new directive, every time a European’s personal data is captured or shared, they have to give meaningful consent, after being informed about the purpose of the use with enough clarity that they can predict what will happen to it. Every time your data is shared with someone, you should be given the name and contact details for an “information controller” at that entity. That’s the baseline: when a company is collecting or sharing information about (or that could reveal!) your “racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, … [and] data concerning health or data concerning a natural person’s sex life or sexual orientation,” there’s an even higher bar to hurdle.
- Meltdown Proof-of-Concept — reading another process’s memory, boom. See also image reconstruction using this technique. Wow.
