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The dominant vision of artificial intelligence imagines a future of large-scale autonomous systems outperforming
humans in an increasing range of fields. This “actually existing AI” vision misconstrues intelligence as autonomous
rather than social and relational. It is both unproductive and dangerous, optimizing for artificial metrics of human
replication rather than for systemic augmentation, and tending to concentrate power, resources, and decision-making
in an engineering elite. Alternative visions based on participating in and augmenting human creativity and cooperation
have a long history and underlie many celebrated digital technologies such as personal computers and the internet.
Researchers and funders should redirect focus from centralized autonomous general intelligence to a plurality of
established and emerging approaches that extend cooperative and augmentative traditions as seen in successes such
as Taiwan’s digital democracy project and collective intelligence platforms like Wikipedia. We conclude with a concrete
set of recommendations and a survey of alternative traditions.

[W]e find everywhere men of mechanical genius, of great general acuteness, and discriminative understanding,
who make no scruple in pronouncing the Automaton—a pure machine, unconnected with human agency in its
movements—and consequently, beyond all comparison, the most astonishing of the inventions of mankind.
—Edgar Allen Poe, Maelzel’s Chess Player (1836)

https://ethics.harvard.edu/how-ai-fails-us

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5G adoption is happening around the world, even in places with low internet penetration. As of February 2021, 131 countries had announced plans to invest in 5G and more than 60 of the 98 countries NDI works in were engaging corporations that have close ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in their 5G plans. Existing research on 5G has focused almost exclusively on its impacts for international security and economic growth. Little is understood in the democracy donor community about the paths to 5G for developing democracies, how players in the 5G rollout process interact with democratic actors in a given country, or where there are strategic points of intervention to defend democracies from illiberal influences and technology standards. NDI set out to address this gap of comprehensive research into the impacts, positive or negative, of 5G on human rights and democracy through NDI’s new white paper, 5G and the Future Internet: Implications for Developing Democracies and Human Rights. https://www.ndi.org/sites/default/files/5GWhitePaper_CorrectedVersion.pdf

Excerpt:

A central question for democracies is whether, and if so how, successful democracies can be maintained and strengthened in an ever-changing Internet-of-Everything era. More research is also needed into the digital strategic approach and partnerships, domestically and abroad, that will enable civil society, government, and stakeholders to effectively exercise oversight, and influence governance policies and decision-making forums.

The implementation of humane, secure and customized technology standards and approaches is a priority. Big tech and local companies are playing a key role in complying with illiberal abuses of technology. Strategies are needed to effectively engage companies to be accountable and to understand that they too have an economic and social stake in secure networks.

The direct risks of 5G to democracy and human rights, and how best to frame technology policies, regulations, federal laws, and global standards to protect these rights must be more deeply understood in order to empower policymakers to understand the impact of their decisions. For instance, the risk of cybersecurity attacks on 5G-backed critical infrastructures like water utilities and power could potentially have significant repercussions for certain communities but are not often well understood or explained.

Parliaments in particular don’t have strong mechanisms for understanding the tradeoffs between digital convenience and democracy and individual rights.

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The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.

“It’s impossible to emerge from the 700 pages of Surveillance Capitalism and not see the devices and applications that we have embraced in our daily lives — fitness trackers, smart thermostats, digital personal assistants — through a wary, more critical lens.”  https://www.cigionline.org/articles/shoshana-zuboff-undetectable-indecipherable-world-surveillance-capitalism

The post The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power appeared first on EMFSA.

Excerpts:
The author criticizes the loss of democratic culture,which makes the implications of the telecommunications policy for the public even worse.The brochure concludes with an appeal that sees the human right to health violated on several levels.He calls on the government and the political parties of the Federal Republic of Germany to put suitable protective measures into place that protect our living environment from increasing levels of EMF and that guarantee the public’s right to health.

Electrohypersensitivity: how ignorance or denial of such findings impact those affected. As a scientist,physician,and expert witness,the author has been involved in numerous cases of persons with electromagnetic hypersensitivity,as well as radar victims of the German Armed forces and the NationalPeople’s Army of the former GRD. He describes the helplessness official agencies and ignorant physicians cause in those affected by electromagnetic hypersensitivity,the microwave syndrome,and radar exposure.He shows how the continuous experience of helplessness turns into a great stressor itself that exacerbates the disease-causing long – term effects of electromagnetic field exposure.

The review of the Russian research reports and papers on the long-term effects of electromagneticfields summarized here had been commissioned by the German Federal Agency of Telecommunications (today the Federal Network Agency). The
review results prove that radiation is a cause of multimorbid clinical findings and nonspecific regulatory
disorders. That these findings were not welcomed by commercial interests is probably responsible for the fact that the 120-page research report immediately disappeared into the archives of theselfsame agency that had commissioned the report in the first place. Likewise,the federal minister of environment was not interested anymore
either.
Both of these reactions, we find, are not compatible with public health. Anybody who finds the strength to accept the necessary responsibility will also have to be willing to depart from the dogma that says that harmful biological effects are only possible through thermal interactions. This would be a breakthrough for a research approach that is
becoming more aware of the autonomy of life and
the modern life sciences. See the link to download the free pdf.
http://kompetenzinitiative.net/KIT/KIT/english-brochures/

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