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Lyons announced the Partnership on AI’s first three working groups, which are dedicated to fair, transparent, and accountable AI; safety-critical AI; and AI, labor, and the economy. Each group will have a for-profit and nonprofit chair and aim to share its results as widely as possible. Lyons says these groups will be like a “union of concerned scientists.” “A big part of this is on us to really achieve inclusivity,” she says. Tess Posner, the executive director of AI4ALL, a nonprofit that runs summer programs teaching AI to students from underrepresented groups, showed why training a diverse group for the next generation of AI workers is essential. Currently, only 13 percent of AI companies have female CEOs, and less than 3 percent of tenure-track engineering faculty in the US are black. Yet an inclusive workforce may have more ideas and can spot problems with systems before they happen, and diversity can improve the bottom line. Posner pointed out a recent Intel report saying diversity could add $500 billion to the US economy.

“It’s good for business,” she says. These weren’t the first presentations at EmTech Digital by women with ideas on fixing AI. On Monday, Microsoft researcher Timnit Gebru presented examples of bias in current AI systems, and earlier on Tuesday Fast.ai cofounder Rachel Thomas talked about her company’s free deep-learning course and its effort to diversify the overall AI workforce. Even with the current problems achieving diversity, there are more women and people of color that could be brou

ght into the workforce.

The broadcast has become an origin story of fake news and technological anxiety in the United States, and its tentacled aliens watch when we talk of fake news today. Then, as now, the worry over whether the news can be believed was a proxy for something else entirely – fear of the new technologies that brought it. Scholars have convincingly questioned the scale of the 1938 panic. Everybody loves a good story – especially the newspapers threatened by radio news, the social scientists seeking a claim to relevance, and Welles, great ham that he was. Firsthand accounts attest that some listeners did panic, but many more did not. Why, then, did millions more find the panic so easy to believe these past 80 years?

In that decade, radio became more trusted than newspapers. The reasons had to do partially with the unique characteristics of the medium – its intimacy and ability to put you on the spot to hear as an event unfolded without a reporting gap in which craven newspapermen could insert their own slant. It also had to do with the trueness of the sounds that radio reproduced.

In November, three days after the War of the Worlds broadcast, Dorothy Thompson, a syndicated columnist and radio reporter, published an oft-cited piece in response, entitled ‘Mr Welles and Mass Delusion’, in which she argued that the broadcast suggested American susceptibility to foreign propaganda:All unwittingly Mr Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of all time. They have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can so convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition as to create nationwide panic … If people can be frightened out of their wits by mythical men from Mars, they can be frightened into fanaticism by the fears of Reds, or convinced that America is in the hands of 60 families, or aroused to revenge against any minority, or terrorised into subservience to leadership because of any imaginable menace.

Since 2002, the US Department of Justice’s WEB Du Bois program has sponsored research fellowships on issues of race and criminal justice. During Republican and Democratic administrations, a diverse group of academics have carried the spirit of the noted sociologist and civil rights leader to the race challenges of the 21st century. Given the racial disparity endemic at every stage of the justice system the DoJ’s investigation of these issues has been praiseworthy. But with Jeff Sessions as attorney general exploring the roots of this injustice may now be compromised. In the recently released solicitation for the Du Bois fellowships the DoJ invited scholars to engage in research on five issues arising out of the “tough on crime” era that would make a student of the Du Bois legacy shudder. Whereas Du Bois is widely known for promoting the idea that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line”, the DoJ solicitation displays no interest in such high-profile issues as police killings of unarmed black men or the impact of mass incarceration on the African American community. Instead, “protecting police officers” is the only area of law enforcement prioritized by the DoJ. Another research priority, “enhancing immigration enforcement”, coming at a moment when barely disguised racist imagery accompanies those policies, seems particularly jarring when upheld in the name of a civil rights legend. The DoJ approach to research is unfortunately consistent with the misconstrued “law and order” agenda that Jeff Sessions has brought to his leadership. Within a month of taking office Sessions had rescinded the Obama-era decision to phase out federal contracting with private prisons. That initiative had been based in part on an inspector general’s finding that such prisons had higher levels of assault and safety concerns than public prisons.