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"Google has launched a webpage where European citizens can request that links to information about them be taken off search results, the first step to comply with a court ruling affirming the "right to be forgotten". The company, which processes more than 90% of all web searches in Europe, has made available a webform through which people can submit their requests but has stopped short of specifying when it will remove links that meet the criteria for being taken down."

"The founders of Predictim want to be clear with me: Their product-an algorithm that scans the online footprint of a prospective babysitter to determine their "risk" levels for parents-is not racist. It is not biased. "We take ethics and bias extremely seriously," Sal Parsa, Predictim's CEO, tells me warily over the phone. "In fact, in the last 18 months we trained our product, our machine, our algorithm to make sure it was ethical and not biased. We took sensitive attributes, protected classes, sex, gender, race, away from our training set. We continuously audit our model. And on top of that we added a human review process.""

"Eck said machine learning, a powerful form of AI, will be integrated into how humans communicate with each other. He raised the idea of "assistive writing" in the future with Google Docs, the company's online word processing software. This may be based on Google's upcoming Smart Compose technology that suggests words and phrases based on what's being typed. Teachers used to worry about whether students used Wikipedia for their homework. Now they may wonder what part of the work the students wrote themselves, Eck said."

"EFF's Legal Director Corynne McSherry offers five lessons to keep in mind: 1. (Lots of) mistakes will be made: copyright takedowns result in the removal of tons of legitimate content. 2. Robots won't help: automated filtering tools like Content ID have been a disaster, and policing copyright with algorithms is a lot easier than policing "bad speech." 3. These systems need to be transparent and have due process. A system that allows for automated instant censorship and slow, manual review of censorship gives a huge advantage to people who want to abuse the system. 4. Punish abuse. The ability to censor other peoples' speech is no joke. If you're careless or malicious in your takedown requests, you should pay a consequence: maybe a fine, maybe being barred form using the takedown system. 5. Voluntary moderation quickly becomes mandatory. Every voluntary effort to stem copyright infringement has been followed by calls to make those efforts mandatory (and expand them)."

"We may be only just starting to understand how digital democracy can help address the crisis of legitimacy that is affecting different levels of the political process."

"The Wheelie 7 kit equips a wheelchair with artificial intelligence to detect the user's expressions and process the data in real-time to direct the movement of the chair. Smiling, raising the eyebrows, wrinkling the nose or puckering the lips as if for a kiss are among the repertoire of 10 gestures recognised by the prototype Wheelie 7."

"Facebook is mired in a series of controversies about the curation of its news feed, from its broadcasting live killings, to editing out an iconic photo of the Vietnam war, to accusations of political bias. It recently tried to smooth the process out by firing its human editors … only to find the news feed degenerated into a mass of fake and controversial news stories."

"Indeed, a recent working paper in the area of machine learning suggests that the simpler the algorithm, the more likely its outcome will further disadvantage already disadvantaged groups. In other words, our social relationships are complex, and our algorithms should be, too. But in the quest to streamline processes, they aren't always, and that can be a huge problem."

"As we move towards this collective humanity mindset, the idea of withholding data to make ourselves feel safer becomes a moral conundrum. If our value is most derived from the data we create for AI to process and discover insights, to withhold that means we are detracting value from the whole, that we are committing something morally wrong. We're exchanging data privacy for a different kind of privacy and astonishing growth, which seems to me a pretty fair trade."

"A school in Poland has been fined €4,600 ($5,200) for breaching Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) after it was found to be processing students' fingerprint data to verify whether they had paid for school lunch. The news comes as biometric data harnessing programs around the world spark significant privacy concerns."

"We are talking about vast fields of aggregate data, the scale of which is difficult to comprehend; this data can be parsed by the artificial intelligence recommendation algorithms that Google has pioneered, and that now steer everything from employment application processes to dating apps."

"ISSUES with the online learning and teaching process has caused students from the low-income group to be left behind, said the National Union of the Teaching Profession (NUTP)."

"The researchers programmed a robot called Pepper, made by SoftBank Robotics, with the ability to vocalise its thought processes. This means the robot is no longer a "black box" and its underlying decision-making is more transparent to the user."

"In a statement, the company said: "Colonial Pipeline is taking steps to understand and resolve this issue. At this time, our primary focus is the safe and efficient restoration of our service and our efforts to return to normal operation. This process is already under way, and we are working diligently to address this matter and to minimize disruption to our customers and those who rely on Colonial Pipeline."

"BuzzFeed said it took "less than 10 minutes" to find Biden's account, "using only a combination of the app's built-in search tool and public friends feature". "In the process," it said, it "found nearly a dozen Biden family members and mapped out a social web that encompasses not only the first family but a wide network of people around them, including the president's children, grandchildren, senior White House officials and all of their contacts on Venmo.""

"But that was not before the falsely accused man had his name and image widely shared. The alert sent by Citizen contained a photo and was seen by more than 861,000 people. It read: "Citizen is offering a $30,000 reward to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest of the arson suspect." Citizen told the Guardian in a statement it offered the cash reward "without formal coordination with the appropriate agencies". "Once we realized this error, we immediately retracted the photo and reward offer," it said. "We are actively working to improve our internal processes to ensure this does not occur again. This was a mistake we are taking very seriously.""

"A natural alternative to symbolic AI came to prominence: Instead of modeling high-level reasoning processes, why not instead model the brain? After all, brains are the only things that we know for certain can produce intelligent behavior. Why not start with them?"

"Last month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent to Microsoft that outlines a process to create a conversational chatbot of a specific person using their social data. In an eerie twist, the patent says the chatbot could potentially be inspired by friends or family members who are deceased, which is almost a direct plot of a popular episode of Netflix's Black Mirror."

"This type of extreme racist post was frequently met with pushback from the community. Common responses included; "people should be treated as individuals not as part of a group" and "the Democrats are the ones who want to divide us up by race". Implicit or explicit gestures of antisemitism were strongly protested by evangelical Christians. Red-pill posts would rarely stay up long. In most cases, they were only intended to appear in one's Instagram feed and to vanish shortly after. The account would then resume posting popular content, wait another week and try it again. This process would continue for months, maybe a year. By posting mainstream conservative content most of the time, these extreme-right groups were able to build up an audience numbering in the range of 30,000 to 40,000, which they could then incrementally expose to radical content."

"Vast sums are being spent by governments across the industrialized and developing worlds on automating poverty and in the process, turning the needs of vulnerable citizens into numbers, replacing the judgment of human caseworkers with the cold, bloodless decision-making of machines. "