Discussing the implications of AI in a societal context. This includes a wide range of issues, including the impact of personalization, privacy, government regulations, cybercrime, and data labeling work.
One of the questions I get most often is: how do we protect ourselves from advanced AI taking over the world? There are many variants, from less-concerned questions about what type of AI we should be investing in to even more paranoid versions of this question. The simple answer is: we don’t even need to think about it. At least not anytime soon...
Artificial Intelligence is playing a critical role in the fight against coronavirus, though it can be hard to understand how exactly it’s contributing in our world full of sensational headlines. I’ll help to cut through this noise. But first, what are others saying? Some stories claim AI is going to completely solve the problem, with headlines...
Big tech firms face intense scrutiny about how much data they collect and how they respect user privacy when using the data. Data drives much of the value of the services we use. There are important trade-offs involved in how companies can best provide valuable services while respecting privacy. Within artificial intelligence, the machine learning...
Modern society is complicated. Big tech companies make our lives much easier. We all carry around powerful computers in our pockets, stay connected with even distant friends on social media, and easily find answers to almost any questions we can imagine. At the same time, these same companies are in a position to make decisions that affect which...
Cybercrime is growing at an alarming rate, and artificial intelligence is supposed to be the solution. This isn’t good enough. Broader, the private security industry isn’t even enough to solve this problem. AI produced by private companies will help, but it has major blindspots such as targeted, high-value attacks. Ignoring structural, government...
Disclaimer: While I previously led a data science team at Facebook and led the AI efforts to identify fake and hacked accounts at Microsoft, I am not representing these companies and speak only for myself. Facebook’s Transparency Report reveals that Facebook takes down billions of fake accounts each quarter. In the first quarter of 2019, Facebook...
Artificial intelligence algorithms, which are based on statistics, make mistakes. Since they accomplish things that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, we tolerate these errors. Most people wouldn’t want a human being reviewing every email sent to Gmail to determine whether or not it’s spam. That would be pretty creepy. But even if having a perfect...
Microsoft detects Apple as spam? Imagine yourself working at Microsoft 15 years ago, where Windows is the dominant platform and Apple’s computer marketshare is miniscule. Now imagine you’re working on a spam filter with the best of intentions, and yet your spam filter starts detecting as spam any email sent from a well-known email program on Mac...
A recent blog post, Google’s Monopoly is Stifling Free Software, made the front page of techmeme yesterday. The post raises important issues, though the message in the headline is wrong. The “Uncommon download” warning reported in that post presumably originates from Google’s Download Protection feature in Chrome. I don’t know Google’s internal...
