policy – Augmented Lawyer

“The internet is less free, more fragmented, and less secure”

The Council on Foreign Relations, described by Wikipedia as a “right leaning American think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international relations,” has issued a report titled Confronting Reality in Cyberspace:

The major findings of the Task Force are as follows:
The era of the global internet is over.
U.S. policies promoting an open, global internet have failed, and Washington will be unable to stop or reverse the trend toward fragmentation.
Data is a source of geopolitical power and competition and is seen as central to economic and national security.

The report is a warning that the U.S. needs to get serious about a fragmenting internet or risk losing digital leadership entirely.

Segmented social media, meet segmented augmented reality

Users on social media are often in their own universes. Liberals often don’t even see the content that conservatives see, and vice versa.

Imagine if that kind of segmentation extended to augmented reality as well:

Imagine a world that’s filled with invisible graffiti. Open an app, point your phone at a wall, and blank brick or cement becomes a canvas. Create art with digital spraypaint and stencils, and an augmented reality system will permanently store its location and placement, creating the illusion of real street art. If friends or social media followers have the app, they can find your painting on a map and come see it. You might scrawl an in-joke across the door of a friend’s apartment, or paint a gorgeous mural on the side of a local store.
Now imagine a darker world. Members of hate groups gleefully swap pictures of racist tags on civil rights monuments. Students bully each other by spreading vicious rumors on the walls of a target’s house. Small businesses get mobbed beyond capacity when a big influencer posts a sticker on their window. The developers of Mark AR, an app that’s described as “the world’s first augmented reality social platform,” are trying to create the good version of this system. They’re still figuring out how to avoid the bad one.
Is the world ready for virtual graffiti?

I first read China Miéville’s The City & the City many years ago, and I keep thinking about how strange it was then, and how much the ideas have resonated since.

There is no Western AI plan

Tim Wu, writing in the New York Times:

But if there is even a slim chance that the race to build stronger A.I. will determine the future of the world — and that does appear to be at least a possibility — the United States and the rest of the West are taking a surprisingly lackadaisical and alarmingly risky approach to the technology.
The plan seems to be for the American tech industry, which makes most of its money in advertising and selling personal gadgets, to serve as champions of the West. . . .
To exaggerate slightly: If this were 1957, we might as well be hoping that the commercial airlines would take us to the moon.
America’s Risky Approach to Artificial Intelligence

Planning requires paying attention. We’re a little distracted in the West these days. And Russia and China love that.

A More Nuanced Encryption Policy Debate

Bruce Schneier on a speech by Attorney General Barr on encryption policy:

I think this is a major change in government position. Previously, the FBI, the Justice Department and so on had claimed that backdoors for law enforcement could be added without any loss of security. They maintained that technologists just need to figure out how: an approach we have derisively named “nerd harder.”
With this change, we can finally have a sensible policy conversation. Yes, adding a backdoor increases our collective security because it allows law enforcement to eavesdrop on the bad guys. But adding that backdoor also decreases our collective security because the bad guys can eavesdrop on everyone. This is exactly the policy debate we should be having [–] not the fake one about whether or not we can have both security and surveillance.
Attorney General William Barr on Encryption Policy

Schneier still believes it is more important that everyone is secure than to provide backdoors to law enforcement, but at least everyone is starting to acknowledge the reality that law enforcement backdoors weaken security.

Defining a “bot” is hard

A new paper by Mark Lemley and Bryan Casey discusses the difficulties of formulating legal definitions of robots:

California enacted a statute making it illegal for an online “bot” to interact with consumers without first disclosing its non-human status. The law’s definition of “bot,” however, leaves much to be desired. Among other ambiguities, it bases its definition on the extent to which “the actions or posts of [an automated]” account are not the result of a person,” with “person” defined to include corporations as well as “natural” people. Truthfully, it’s hard to imagine any online activity—no matter how automated—that is “not the result of a (real or corporate) person” at the end of the day.
You Might Be a Robot at 3.

Like obscenity, there do not appear to be any good definitions of “robot.” The paper instead suggests that regulators focus on behavior, not definitions:

A good example of this approach is the Better Online Ticket Sales Act of 2016 (aka “BOTS Act”). The Act makes no attempt to define bot. Instead, it simply prohibits efforts to get around security protocols like CAPTCHA. We don’t actually need to decide whether you are a bot. As the BOTS Act demonstrates, we can achieve our goals by deciding whether someone (or something) is circumventing the protocol.
Id. at 40.

One of the major problems is that so much unethical behavior is a combination of both human and automated activity. Meanwhile, human-in-the-loop processes are viewed as a solution to ethical AI problems. The idea that bots are ever truly autonomous is specious. We are the bots, and the bots are us.

OpenAI identifies AI Ethics as a collective action problem

OpenAI has released a blog post and paper addressing the problem of collective action in AI ethics:

If companies respond to competitive pressures by rushing a technology to market before it has been deemed safe, they will find themselves in a collective action problem. Even if each company would prefer to compete to develop and release systems that are safe, many believe they can’t afford to do so because they might be beaten to market by other companies.
Why Responsible AI Development Needs Cooperation on Safety

And they identify four strategies to address this issue:

Promote accurate beliefs about the opportunities for cooperation
Collaborate on shared research and engineering challenges
Open up more aspects of AI development to appropriate oversight and feedback; and
Incentivize adherence to high standards of safety

The bottom line is that normal factors encouraging development of safe products (the market, liability laws, regulation, etc.) may not be present or sufficient in the race to develop AI products. Self regulation will be important if companies want to maintain that government regulation is not necessary.

Major supplier of police body cameras concludes facial recognition is not reliable enough to sell ethically

Chaim Gartenberg, writing for The Verge:

Axon (formally known as Taser) has been shifting its business toward body cameras for police officers for the past few years, but today, the company is making a big change. At the recommendation of its AI ethics board, “Axon will not be commercializing face matching products on our body camera,” the company announced in a blog post today.
[. . . . .]
According to the board’s report, “Face recognition technology is not currently reliable enough to ethically justify its use on body-worn cameras.” It cites that, at the very least, more accurate technology that “performs equally well across races, ethnicities, genders, and other identity groups” would be required, assuming facial recognition technology for police body cameras can ever be considered ethical at all, a conversation that the board has begun to examine.
Axon (formerly Taser) says facial recognition on police body cams is unethical

One issue we keep sidestepping is that facial recognition technology is never going to be either perfectly accurate or perfectly equal across all classes of people. In other words, no matter how accurate the technology becomes there will always be some small differences in performance between, for example, recognizing light-skinned and dark-skinned people. So the question becomes, is any difference in accuracy tolerable? What amount?

A proposal to tax targeted digital ads

Paul Romer proposes tax policy, instead of antitrust, to nudge privacy in the right direction:

Of course, companies are incredibly clever about avoiding taxes. But in this case, that’s a good thing for all of us. This tax would spur their creativity. Ad-driven platform companies could avoid the tax entirely by switching to the business model that many digital companies already offer: an ad-free subscription. Under this model, consumers know what they give up, and the success of the business would not hinge on tracking customers with ever more sophisticated surveillance techniques. A company could succeed the old-fashioned way: by delivering a service that is worth more than it costs.
A Tax That Could Fix Big Tech

Not a bad idea.

Sludge: A Negative Sort of Nudge

Cass Sunstein wrote a new paper on “sludge,” which is the inverse of his and Richard Thaler’s concept of Nudge.

A “nudge” is a way of designing choices so that the easiest path is the healthiest or smartest or “best.” It is a form of libertarian paternalism that tries to influence behavior while also respecting freedom of choice. E.g., automatic opt-in to organ donations with the option to opt-out.

Sludge, on the other hand, is “excessive or unjustified frictions that make it more difficult for consumers, employees, . . . and many others to get what they want or to do as they wish.” For example:

To obtain benefits under a health care law, people must navigate a complicated website. Many of them do not understand the questions that they are being asked. For many people, the application takes a long time. Some of them give up.

Sunstein argues that organizations should regularly perform “sludge audits” to remove these kinds of anti-nudges from their process:

[T]he power of simplification puts a spotlight on the large
consequences of seemingly modest sludge—on the effects of choice architecture in determining outcomes. Simplification and burden reduction do not merely reduce frustration; they can change people’s lives.
Sludge Audits at 10-11.

As the world becomes more complicated and the attention economy more competitive, choice architecture is more important than ever.

AI Transparency Tension: NYPD Sex Chat Bots

The NYPD is using AI chat bots to surface and warn individuals looking to buy sex:

A man texts an online ad for sex.
He gets a text back: “Hi Papi. Would u like to go on a date?” There’s a conversation: what he’d like the woman to do, when and where to meet, how much he will pay.
After a few minutes, the texts stop. It’s not unexpected — women offering commercial sex usually text with several potential buyers at once. So the man, too, usually texts several women at once.
What he doesn’t expect is this: He is texting not with a woman but with a computer program, a piece of artificial intelligence that has taught itself to talk like a sex worker.
A.I. Joins the Campaign Against Sex Trafficking

The article posts an example of an actual chat conversation and it is worth reading to get a sense of the AI capabilities.

Ethics tension. It’s worth noting that many AI ethics frameworks emphasize the importance of informing humans when they are interacting with bots. See also the Google Duplex controversy. Instead, this is indeed deception-by-design. How does this fall within an ethical framework? Are we immediately making trade-offs between effectiveness and transparency?