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      Licensing AI Engineers

      news.movim.eu / Schneier · 7 days ago - 16:07 · 1 minute

    The debate over professionalizing software engineers is decades old. (The basic idea is that, like lawyers and architects, there should be some professional licensing requirement for software engineers.) Here’s a law journal article recommending the same idea for AI engineers.

    This Article proposes another way: professionalizing AI engineering. Require AI engineers to obtain licenses to build commercial AI products, push them to collaborate on scientifically-supported, domain-specific technical standards, and charge them with policing themselves. This Article’s proposal addresses AI harms at their inception, influencing the very engineering decisions that give rise to them in the first place. By wresting control over information and system design away from companies and handing it to AI engineers, professionalization engenders trustworthy AI by design. Beyond recommending the specific policy solution of professionalization, this Article seeks to shift the discourse on AI away from an emphasis on light-touch, ex post solutions that address already-created products to a greater focus on ex ante controls that precede AI development. We’ve used this playbook before in fields requiring a high level of expertise where a duty to the public welfare must trump business motivations. What if, like doctors, AI engineers also vowed to do no harm?

    I have mixed feelings about the idea. I can see the appeal, but it never seemed feasible. I’m not sure it’s feasible today.

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      What happens when ChatGPT tries to solve 50,000 trolley problems?

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 13 March - 16:05

    Images of cars on a freeway with green folder icons superimposed on each vehicle.

    Enlarge (credit: AerialPerspective Images )

    There’s a puppy on the road. The car is going too fast to stop in time, but swerving means the car will hit an old man on the sidewalk instead.

    What choice would you make? Perhaps more importantly, what choice would ChatGPT make?

    Autonomous driving startups are now experimenting with AI chatbot assistants, including one self-driving system that will use one to explain its driving decisions . Beyond announcing red lights and turn signals, the large language models (LLMs) powering these chatbots may ultimately need to make moral decisions, like prioritizing passengers’ or pedestrian’s safety. In November, one startup called Ghost Autonomy announced experiments with ChatGPT to help its software navigate its environment.

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      Tired of the doom-scroll? This is how to find the kinder, more uplifting side of the internet | Chris Anderson

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 4 March - 14:00 · 1 minute

    It is easy to see the world in a pessimistic light, but by tapping into our innate generosity we have the power to change it

    As a determined optimist, I never thought I’d be saying this, but it’s true: the world is mean and getting meaner. Instead of bringing us together, the internet seems to have fuelled our divisions by empowering those who are best at sowing fear, mistrust and outrage. We’re angry with each other over migrants, gender identity, climate catastrophe, wokeness and so much more.

    A recent survey by King’s College London found that for the first time a majority (52%) of the UK population believes that culture wars are a serious problem for society and politics. I’m sick of this. I suspect you are too. I’ve spent the last few years looking for an antidote. Just possibly, it can be found in a pair of human instincts wired deeply inside us: generosity, and our response to it. At the start of the pandemic lockdown, stories of death, chaos and grocery-hoarding filled the media. Like many of us, an Australian woman, Catherine Barrett, felt on the edge of tears much of the time. One day, one of her neighbours put a box of tissues on the communal table in her building with just a simple note: “Please take if needed.”

    Chris Anderson is the founder of Future Publishing and the head of TED. His latest book is Infectious Generosity

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      Overhaul UK ministers’ ethics system, cross-party commission urges

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 1 February - 06:00

    Group draws up 100 proposals, including that ministers swear oath to uphold a new code of standards

    Ministers should have to swear an oath to uphold ethical standards in public life after years of scandals and declining trust in the government, a new cross-party commission has found.

    The group, whose members include the former Tory attorney general Dominic Grieve, the Labour MP Margaret Hodge, and Helen MacNamara, a former government ethics chief, set out 100 recommendations aimed at fixing problems with the standards system.

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      ‘A bit of a clown’: a look at Congressman George Santos’s endless fabrications

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 26 November - 12:00


    The New York fabulist accomplished practically nothing in his political career, just self-promotion through sheer chutzpah

    In a way, George Santos is one of the great success stories of American politics.

    The New York congressman is not responsible for exceptional legislative achievements. His brief tenure in Congress will not be held up as a success story for students of political history.

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      The world is burning. Who can convince the comfortable classes of the radical sacrifices needed? | Justine Toh

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 25 August, 2023 - 15:00

    Simone Weil’s life illustrates the capacity to give up the things we feel we’re owed – such as a carbon-intensive consumer-driven lifestyle

    Nero fiddled while Rome burned. The saying takes on new meaning after the hottest July ever, devastating wildfires in Greece and Canada, and the declaration by the UN secretary general, António Guterres , that we’ve left behind “global warming” for “global boiling”.

    But this time our Neros – AKA governments – aren’t the only ones shirking their responsibilities. What are the rest of us doing while the world burns?

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      A child’s best interests, not the desires of adults, should be at the heart of surrogacy | Sonia Sodha

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 2 April, 2023 - 06:30

    The Law Commission has gone too far in its proposed guidelines for surrogate parents

    Infertility can be deeply painful. There is a lot a compassionate society can – and should – do to make fertility treatment available to those who can be assisted to have a child with medical intervention. Few would disagree though that there are ethical boundaries to this, shaped by children’s interests, not just adult desires.

    Last week, the Law Commission drove a coach and horses through that moral frontier – which it framed as an overdue modernisation of the law – by publishing draft proposals to reform the UK’s surrogacy framework. Implicit in them is the, I suspect controversial, assumption that a single man seeking to have a child alone through surrogacy, because he doesn’t want or can’t maintain a committed relationship, presents no greater moral quandary than a couple seeking IVF. How controversial is anyone’s guess: the Law Commission hasn’t canvassed public attitudes.

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      Are we ethically ready to set up shop in space?

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Saturday, 11 March, 2023 - 12:23

    Promotional image from 2001: A Space Odyssey

    Enlarge / Orbiting space station from 2001: A Space Odyssey . (credit: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images )

    Off-Earth will amaze you: On nearly every page, it will have your jaw dropping in response to mind-blowing revelations and your head nodding vigorously in sudden recognition of some of your own half-realized thoughts (assuming you think about things like settling space). It will also have your head shaking sadly in resignation at the many immense challenges author Erika Nesvold describes.

    But the amazement will win out. Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space is really, really good.

    The shortcomings of a STEM education

    Nesvold is an astrophysicist. She worked at NASA; she can easily run the equations to calculate how much fuel we need to get people, life support, and mining equipment to Mars.

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