Author: The Conversation
by Nnenna Ifeanyi-Ajufo, University of Bradford _Several African countries are pursuing digital transformation ambitions – applying new technologies to enhance the development of society. But concerns exist over the absence of appropriate policies across the continent to create a resilient and secure cyber environment. Nnenna Ifeanyi-Ajufo, a technology law expert, explains the current cyber governance situation in Africa. What is cyber governance and why is it so important? Cyber governance is an important aspect of the international cybersecurity strategy for preventing and mitigating cyber threats. It features oversight processes, decision-making hierarchies and international cooperation. It also includes systems for accountability…
BY Emilio Ferrara, University of Southern California When I asked ChatGPT for a joke about Sicilians the other day, it implied that Sicilians are stinky. ChatGPT can sometimes produce stereotypical or offensive outputs. Screen capture by Emilio Ferrara, CC BY-ND As somebody born and raised in Sicily, I reacted to ChatGPT’s joke with disgust. But at the same time, my computer scientist brain began spinning around a seemingly simple question: Should ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence systems be allowed to be biased? You might say “Of course not!” And that would be a reasonable response. But there are some researchers,…
by Bruce Schneier, Harvard Kennedy School and Nathan Sanders, Harvard University If you ask Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant AI system, whether Amazon is a monopoly, it responds by saying it doesn’t know. It doesn’t take much to make it lambaste the other tech giants, but it’s silent about its own corporate parent’s misdeeds. When Alexa responds in this way, it’s obvious that it is putting its developer’s interests ahead of yours. Usually, though, it’s not so obvious whom an AI system is serving. To avoid being exploited by these systems, people will need to learn to approach AI skeptically. That…
by Wally Smith, The University of Melbourne and Greg Wadley, The University of Melbourne Most of us go online multiple times a day. About half of 18–29 year olds surveyed in a 2021 Pew Research Study said they are “almost constantly” connected. How are we to make sense of this significant digital dimension of modern life? Many questions have rightly been asked about its broader consequences for society and the economy. But there remains a simpler question about what motivates people across a range of ages, occupations and cultures to be so absorbed in digital connection. And we can turn…
by Thomas Daum, University of Hohenheim; Frédéric Baudron, International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT); Ingo Grass, University of Hohenheim; Matin Qaim, University of Bonn, and Regina Birner, University of Hohenheim Cultivating one hectare of maize used to be an arduous task for Precious Banda, a farmer in Zambia. It would take her hundreds of hours to prepare her land before sowing and to keep it weed-free until harvest – equipped with nothing but a small hoe. She says it was backbreaking work: “I can still feel it.” For a few years now she has hired a tractor, and a…
by Nir Eisikovits, UMass Boston The rise of ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence systems has been accompanied by a sharp increase in anxiety about AI. For the past few months, executives and AI safety researchers have been offering predictions, dubbed “P(doom),” about the probability that AI will bring about a large-scale catastrophe. Worries peaked in May 2023 when the nonprofit research and advocacy organization Center for AI Safety released a one-sentence statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” The statement was signed by many…
by Casey Fiesler, University of Colorado Boulder Twitter’s move on July 1, 2023, to limit the number of tweets users can see in a day was the latest in a series of decisions that has spurred millions of users to sign up with alternative microblogging platforms since Elon Musk acquired Twitter last year. In addition to a surge in numbers on Mastodon, the acquisition and subsequent changes boosted small existing platforms like Hive Social and has spawned brand new upstarts like Spoutible and Spill. Most recently the microblogging platform backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky, saw a surge of…
by Mohammed Hassan, University of Arizona If you’ve ever wished you had a faster phone, computer or internet connection, you’ve encountered the personal experience of hitting a limit of technology. But there might be help on the way. Over the past several decades, scientists and engineers like me have worked to develop faster transistors, the electronic components underlying modern electronic and digital communications technologies. These efforts have been based on a category of materials called semiconductors that have special electrical properties. Silicon is perhaps the best known example of this type of material. But about a decade ago, scientific efforts…
by David Luke, London School of Economics and Political Science A new European law that imposes the first ever carbon border tax in the world comes into force in October 2023. It will be applied gradually over the next three years before it is fully implemented. A carbon tax is a type of levy imposed on greenhouse gas emissions. It is meant to encourage companies to adopt clean methods of production. But firms could get around the tax by moving production units outside the EU to countries with less strict terms, such as those in Africa, and then exporting products…
by Adrian Barnett, Queensland University of Technology Fraud in science is alarmingly common. Sometimes researchers lie about results and invent data to win funding and prestige. Other times, researchers might pay to stage and publish entirely bogus studies to win an undeserved pay rise – fuelling a “paper mill” industry worth an estimated €1 billion a year. Some of this rubbish can be easily spotted by peer reviewers, but the peer review system has become badly stretched by ever-rising paper numbers. And there’s a new threat, as more sophisticated AI is able to generate plausible scientific data. The latest idea…