Data, Science & Tech

When I worked at the social network, I saw how users in the Global South shared their accounts with shady middlemen. The practice erodes public trust and is corrupting civil discourse around the world.

She was a star engineer who warned that messy AI can spread racism. Google brought her in. Then it forced her out. Can Big Tech take criticism from within?

This Essay asserts that in the United States racial segregation has and continues to play a central evolutionary role in the inequalities we see reproduced and

Pandemic lockdowns ramped up home network usage. Deloitte’s Connectivity & Mobile Trends 2021 survey suggests that providers held up to the stress.

A better reason to upgrade than maxing that 5GB.

The FBI and Australian Federal Police ran an encrypted chat platform and intercepted secret messages between criminal gang members from all over the world for more than three years.

Attempts to use artificial intelligence to diagnose and predict covid-19 have so far been unsuccessful, says Michael Roberts

City governments are embracing data-driven and algorithmic planning to tackle urban problems. Data-driven analytics have an unprecedented capacity to call urban futures into being. At the same time, ...

The pairing of massive data sets with processes—or algorithms—written in computer code to sort through, organize, extract, or mine them has made inroads in almost every major social institution. This article proposes a reading of the scholarly literature concerned with the social implications of this transformation. First, we discuss the rise of a new occupational class, which we call the coding elite. This group has consolidated power through their technical control over the digital means of production and by extracting labor from a newly marginalized or unpaid workforce, the cybertariat. Second, we show that the implementation of techniques of mathematical optimization across domains as varied as education, medicine, credit and finance, and criminal justice has intensified the dominance of actuarial logics of decision-making, potentially transforming pathways to social reproduction and mobility but also generating a pushback by those so governed. Third, we explore how the same pervasive algorithmic intermediation in digital communication is transforming the way people interact, associate, and think. We conclude by cautioning against the wildest promises of artificial intelligence but acknowledging the increasingly tight coupling between algorithmic processes, social structures, and subjectivities. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 47 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Here’s how to opt out of Amazon’s Sidewalk network.

Artificial intelligence (AI) badly needs a bump in speed to live up to potentials such as for autonomous vehicles; photonic integration may fill the breach.

Crime concerns have sparked a new idea to add security cameras in San Francisco’s Castro District, but some community groups say cameras aren’t the answer and raise concerns about privacy.

In recent years, health-tracking wearables have become ubiquitous. What if we could use these devices to track the health of our romantic relationships and prevent conflicts?

A drone that can select and engage targets on its own attacked soldiers during a civil conflict in Libya.Why it matters: If confirmed, it would likely represent the first-known case of a machine-learning-based autonomous weapon being used to kill, potentially heralding a dangerous new era in warfare.Get market news worthy of your time with Axios Markets. Subscribe for free.Driving the news: According to a recent report by the UN Panel of Experts on Libya, a Turkish-made STM Kargu-2 drone may have "hunted down and ... engaged" retreating soldiers fighting with Libyan Gen. Khalifa Haftar last year.It's not clear whether any soldiers were killed in the attack, although the UN experts — which call the drone a "lethal autonomous weapons system" — imply they likely were.Such an event, writes Zachary Kallenborn — a research affiliate with the Unconventional Weapons and Technology Division of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism — would represent "a new chapter in autonomous weapons, one in which they are used to fight and kill human beings based on artificial intelligence."How it works: The Kargu is a loitering drone that uses computer vision to select and engage targets without a connection between the drone and its operator, giving it "a true 'fire, forget and find' capability," the UN report notes.Between the lines: Recent conflicts — like those between Armenia and Azerbaijan and Israel and Hamas in Gaza — have featured an extensive use of drones of all sorts. The deployment of truly autonomous drones could represent a military revolution on par with the introduction of guns or aircraft — and unlike nuclear weapons, they're likely to be easily obtainable by nearly any military force.What they're saying: "If new technology makes deterrence impossible, it might condemn us to a future where everyone is always on the offense," the economist Noah Smith writes in a frightening post on the future of war. The bottom line: Humanitarian organizations and many AI experts have called for a global ban on lethal autonomous weapons, but a number of countries — including the U.S. — have stood in the way.More from Axios: Sign up to get the latest market trends with Axios Markets. Subscribe for free

Facebook has ended its ban on posts asserting Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured, reflecting a deepening debate over the origins of the pandemic.

Artificial intelligence ethics teams are playing a greater role at tech companies and helping them deal with bias and fairness issues that have cropped up at companies such as Twitter.

Almost 2.5 million people signed up to Dr. B with the promise of getting leftover vaccines. Months later, the site won’t disclose how many doses it helped deliver—or what it plans to do with user data.

The company says it was not suppressing certain points of view

Los-Angeles based startup Canoo revealed its newest — and now third — electric vehicle, a pickup truck that does away with the sharp corners and huge engine housing of both comparable EV trucks and legacy diesel pickups and is aimed at both commercial customers and weekend warrior-minded consumers.…

Listen to this episode from Recode Daily on Spotify. From the Recode Daily archives (April 9, 2021): Dark patterns, the design tricks websites and apps use to get you to click “yes,” are all over the digital world. Recode’s Sara Morrison (@SaraMorrison) explains the movement to regulate them. You can read Sara’s story on dark patterns here. Enjoyed this episode? Rate Recode Daily ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. What do you want to learn on Recode Daily? Send your requests and questions to recodedaily@recode.net. We read every email!  Support Recode Daily by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear the next episode of Recode Daily by subscribing in your favorite podcast app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices This episode was made by:  Host: Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) Producer: Will Reid (@WillR56) Engineer: Paul Mounsey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Some researchers are up in arms about a U.S. Census Bureau proposal to add privacy protections by manipulating numbers in the data most widely used for economic and demographic research

Just 6% of respondents said they ensure AI is used ethically and responsibly by making development teams diverse.

I have had the privilege of being at Google for the past six years. One of the most impressive things I’ve seen there was an Ethical AI…

The cache includes data on 1.7 million incidents, giving insight into the scale of Citizen around the country.

The social network expands punishments for misleading posts to individuals for the first time.