The Black Box Society
The Black Box Society

Author: Frank Pasquale

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2015-01-05

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0674967100

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Every day, corporations are connecting the dots about our personal behavior—silently scrutinizing clues left behind by our work habits and Internet use. The data compiled and portraits created are incredibly detailed, to the point of being invasive. But who connects the dots about what firms are doing with this information? The Black Box Society argues that we all need to be able to do so—and to set limits on how big data affects our lives. Hidden algorithms can make (or ruin) reputations, decide the destiny of entrepreneurs, or even devastate an entire economy. Shrouded in secrecy and complexity, decisions at major Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms were long assumed to be neutral and technical. But leaks, whistleblowers, and legal disputes have shed new light on automated judgment. Self-serving and reckless behavior is surprisingly common, and easy to hide in code protected by legal and real secrecy. Even after billions of dollars of fines have been levied, underfunded regulators may have only scratched the surface of this troubling behavior. Frank Pasquale exposes how powerful interests abuse secrecy for profit and explains ways to rein them in. Demanding transparency is only the first step. An intelligible society would assure that key decisions of its most important firms are fair, nondiscriminatory, and open to criticism. Silicon Valley and Wall Street need to accept as much accountability as they impose on others.

New Laws of Robotics
New Laws of Robotics

Author: Frank Pasquale

Publisher: Belknap Press

Published: 2020-10-27

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0674975227

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“Essential reading for all who have a vested interest in the rise of AI.” —Daryl Li, AI & Society “Thought-provoking...Explores how we can best try to ensure that robots work for us, rather than against us, and proposes a new set of laws to provide a conceptual framework for our thinking on the subject.” —Financial Times “Pasquale calls for a society-wide reengineering of policy, politics, economics, and labor relations to set technology on a more regulated and egalitarian path...Makes a good case for injecting more bureaucracy into our techno-dreams, if we really want to make the world a better place.” —Wired “Pasquale is one of the leading voices on the uneven and often unfair consequences of AI in our society...Every policymaker should read this book and seek his counsel.” —Safiya Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression Too many CEOs tell a simple story about the future of work: if a machine can do what you do, your job will be automated, and you will be replaced. They envision everyone from doctors to soldiers rendered superfluous by ever-more-powerful AI. Another story is possible. In virtually every walk of life, robotic systems can make labor more valuable, not less. Frank Pasquale tells the story of nurses, teachers, designers, and others who partner with technologists, rather than meekly serving as data sources for their computerized replacements. This cooperation reveals the kind of technological advance that could bring us all better health care, education, and more, while maintaining meaningful work. These partnerships also show how law and regulation can promote prosperity for all, rather than a zero-sum race of humans against machines. Policymakers must not allow corporations or engineers alone to answer questions about how far AI should be entrusted to assume tasks once performed by humans, or about the optimal mix of robotic and human interaction. The kind of automation we get—and who benefits from it—will depend on myriad small decisions about how to develop AI. Pasquale proposes ways to democratize that decision-making, rather than centralize it in unaccountable firms. Sober yet optimistic, New Laws of Robotics offers an inspiring vision of technological progress, in which human capacities and expertise are the irreplaceable center of an inclusive economy.

Black Box Thinking
Black Box Thinking

Author: Matthew Syed

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-11-03

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 069840887X

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Nobody wants to fail. But in highly complex organizations, success can happen only when we confront our mistakes, learn from our own version of a black box, and create a climate where it’s safe to fail. We all have to endure failure from time to time, whether it’s underperforming at a job interview, flunking an exam, or losing a pickup basketball game. But for people working in safety-critical industries, getting it wrong can have deadly consequences. Consider the shocking fact that preventable medical error is the third-biggest killer in the United States, causing more than 400,000 deaths every year. More people die from mistakes made by doctors and hospitals than from traffic accidents. And most of those mistakes are never made public, because of malpractice settlements with nondisclosure clauses. For a dramatically different approach to failure, look at aviation. Every passenger aircraft in the world is equipped with an almost indestructible black box. Whenever there’s any sort of mishap, major or minor, the box is opened, the data is analyzed, and experts figure out exactly what went wrong. Then the facts are published and procedures are changed, so that the same mistakes won’t happen again. By applying this method in recent decades, the industry has created an astonishingly good safety record. Few of us put lives at risk in our daily work as surgeons and pilots do, but we all have a strong interest in avoiding predictable and preventable errors. So why don’t we all embrace the aviation approach to failure rather than the health-care approach? As Matthew Syed shows in this eye-opening book, the answer is rooted in human psychology and organizational culture. Syed argues that the most important determinant of success in any field is an acknowledgment of failure and a willingness to engage with it. Yet most of us are stuck in a relationship with failure that impedes progress, halts innovation, and damages our careers and personal lives. We rarely acknowledge or learn from failure—even though we often claim the opposite. We think we have 20/20 hindsight, but our vision is usually fuzzy. Syed draws on a wide range of sources—from anthropology and psychology to history and complexity theory—to explore the subtle but predictable patterns of human error and our defensive responses to error. He also shares fascinating stories of individuals and organizations that have successfully embraced a black box approach to improvement, such as David Beckham, the Mercedes F1 team, and Dropbox.

Configuring the Networked Self
Configuring the Networked Self

Author: Julie E. Cohen

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2012-01-24

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0300125437

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The legal and technical rules governing flows of information are out of balance, argues Julie E. Cohen in this original analysis of information law and policy. Flows of cultural and technical information are overly restricted, while flows of personal information often are not restricted at all. The author investigates the institutional forces shaping the emerging information society and the contradictions between those forces and the ways that people use information and information technologies in their everyday lives. She then proposes legal principles to ensure that people have ample room for cultural and material participation as well as greater control over the boundary conditions that govern flows of information to, from, and about them.

Portfolio Society
Portfolio Society

Author: Ivan Ascher

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2016-09-02

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1935408747

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A bold extension of Marx's Capital for the twenty-first century: at once a critique of modern finance and of the societies under its spell. As financial markets expand and continue to refashion the world in their own image, the wealth of capitalist societies no longer presents itself, as it did to Karl Marx in the nineteenth century, as a “monstrous collection of commodities.” Instead, it appears as an equally monstrous collection of financial securities, and the critique of political economy must proceed accordingly. But what would it mean to write Capital in the twenty-first century? Are we really to believe that risk, rather than labor, is now regarded as the true fount of economic value? Can it truly be the case that the credit relation—at least in the global North—has replaced the wage relation as the key site of exploitation and political struggle? And finally, if precarity is indeed the name of today's proletarian condition, what possible future does it actually portend, what analysis does it require? Through a series of creative substitutions, in Portfolio Society Ivan Ascherextends Marx's critical project in bold and unexpected ways. Ascher not only explains some of the often mystifying processes of contemporary finance, he also invites us to consider what becomes of capitalism itself in those places where the relation of capital to its own future is now mediated by financial markets. In the end, we may find that much has changed and much has not; relations of domination endure, and mystifications abound, but the devil is in the details, and that is where Ascher directs our attention. At once a critique of modern finance and of the societies under its spell, Portfolio Society succeeds in revealing the potential limits of Capital, while reveling still in its limitless potential.

The Offensive Internet
The Offensive Internet

Author: Saul Levmore

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-05-01

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0674058763

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The Internet has been romanticized as a zone of freedom. The alluring combination of sophisticated technology with low barriers to entry and instantaneous outreach to millions of users has mesmerized libertarians and communitarians alike. Lawmakers have joined the celebration, passing the Communications Decency Act, which enables Internet Service Providers to allow unregulated discourse without danger of liability, all in the name of enhancing freedom of speech. But an unregulated Internet is a breeding ground for offensive conduct. At last we have a book that begins to focus on abuses made possible by anonymity, freedom from liability, and lack of oversight. The distinguished scholars assembled in this volume, drawn from law and philosophy, connect the absence of legal oversight with harassment and discrimination. Questioning the simplistic notion that abusive speech and mobocracy are the inevitable outcomes of new technology, they argue that current misuse is the outgrowth of social, technological, and legal choices. Seeing this clearly will help us to be better informed about our options. In a field still dominated by a frontier perspective, this book has the potential to be a real game changer. Armed with example after example of harassment in Internet chat rooms and forums, the authors detail some of the vile and hateful speech that the current combination of law and technology has bred. The facts are then treated to analysis and policy prescriptions. Read this book and you will never again see the Internet through rose-colored glasses.

Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI
Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI

Author: Markus D. Dubber

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-06-30

Total Pages: 1000

ISBN-13: 0190067411

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This volume tackles a quickly-evolving field of inquiry, mapping the existing discourse as part of a general attempt to place current developments in historical context; at the same time, breaking new ground in taking on novel subjects and pursuing fresh approaches. The term "A.I." is used to refer to a broad range of phenomena, from machine learning and data mining to artificial general intelligence. The recent advent of more sophisticated AI systems, which function with partial or full autonomy and are capable of tasks which require learning and 'intelligence', presents difficult ethical questions, and has drawn concerns from many quarters about individual and societal welfare, democratic decision-making, moral agency, and the prevention of harm. This work ranges from explorations of normative constraints on specific applications of machine learning algorithms today-in everyday medical practice, for instance-to reflections on the (potential) status of AI as a form of consciousness with attendant rights and duties and, more generally still, on the conceptual terms and frameworks necessarily to understand tasks requiring intelligence, whether "human" or "A.I."

The Black Box
The Black Box

Author: Marquett Burton

Publisher: Sasn

Published: 2020-08-09

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780578745060

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The Black Box is not a tale of a great man. This story is about someone like you: a human being endeavoring to make tomorrow better than today. Each chapter recounts a formative experience and concludes with a 'Black Box': an explanation of how a given situation helped me develop the mindset required to thrive in that type of environment.An airplane's black box records all circumstantial things occurring around and within the aircraft, as well as the voices (and radio transmissions) in the head of the airliner. When an airplane crashes engineers look into the black box to study what went wrong. However, black boxes also have stories of success, but we rarely look to them for those narratives. Memories, like a black box, are nearly permanent records. Black boxes are stored in reinforced shells designed to survive 30 minutes in 2000-degree Fahrenheit heat as well as submersion in 20,000 feet deep water.Your black box is filled with helpful memories, but so often you fail to look into your black box to pull wisdom from it. Sometimes we do not want to open the black box and look in because it means seeing our hardships replayed, seeing things that cause us fear and pain. As you peer into my black box, it will inspires you to look into your own. Our black boxes are filled with explanations of why we crash as well as stories of how we have soared above turbulence.Most of these chapters have been developed as self encapsulated stories from which a moral can be drawn without reference to previous chapters. I share the story of my life knowing that my achievements outstrip those of the average person by only a modest margin. The validity of this work lies in the distance between my starting point and where I stand today. This book is about you. It should drive you to consult your black box as you adventure through life, and to use the experience, strength and resolve that you already have to make your journey easier and more enjoyable.

Turing's Cathedral
Turing's Cathedral

Author: George Dyson

Publisher: Pantheon

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 0375422773

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Documents the innovations of a group of eccentric geniuses who developed computer code in the mid-20th century as part of mathematician Alan Turin's theoretical universal machine idea, exploring how their ideas led to such developments as digital television, modern genetics and the hydrogen bomb.

The Black Box of Biology
The Black Box of Biology

Author: Michel Morange

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-06-09

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 0674281365

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In this masterful account, a historian of science surveys the molecular biology revolution, its origin and continuing impact. Since the 1930s, a molecular vision has been transforming biology. Michel Morange provides an incisive and overarching history of this transformation, from the early attempts to explain organisms by the structure of their chemical components, to the birth and consolidation of genetics, to the latest technologies and discoveries enabled by the new science of life. Morange revisits A History of Molecular Biology and offers new insights from the past twenty years into his analysis. The Black Box of Biology shows that what led to the incredible transformation of biology was not a simple accumulation of new results, but the molecularization of a large part of biology. In fact, Morange argues, the greatest biological achievements of the past few decades should still be understood within the molecular paradigm. What has happened is not the displacement of molecular biology by other techniques and avenues of research, but rather the fusion of molecular principles and concepts with those of other disciplines, including genetics, physics, structural chemistry, and computational biology. This has produced decisive changes, including the discoveries of regulatory RNAs, the development of massive scientific programs such as human genome sequencing, and the emergence of synthetic biology, systems biology, and epigenetics. Original, persuasive, and breathtaking in its scope, The Black Box of Biology sets a new standard for the history of the ongoing molecular revolution.