President Barack Obama returned to the political fray on Friday morning, delivering a speech at the University of Illinois, which gave him an award for “ethics in government.” Leaving aside, for now, the question of whether Obama deserved an ethics award, all should agree that the University of Illinois had no business giving one. That […]
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What matters more to Trump? Hiding juicy gossip or ‘a government that is not accountable’?
The Trump White House nondisclosure agreements that are back in the news thanks to Omarosa Manigault Newman open up big questions about the Trump administration’s obsession with secrecy and obsessive avoidance of accountability. That goes beyond questions of collusion with Russia or whether “executive time” is really just Donald Trump tweeting from the toilet or […]
Read MoreMaxine Waters Hit with FEC Complaint over Campaign Mailers
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), the California congresswoman known for being an outspoken member of the “resistance” against President Donald Trump, is getting slammed with an ethics complaint from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over money raised from her campaign mailers. The FEC complaint filed by the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) in July claimed […]
Read MoreSeveral experts explain key ethical issues about AI
Artificial intelligence has nearly unimaginable potential to shape the world, but it poses a number of significant ethical questions that need to be carefully examined at every step to reduce bias. Several experts give a rundown of the main concerns. Advances in computing and the existence of entirely new data sets are ushering in AI […]
Read MoreExperts Explain Why ‘Doin’ it for the Gram’ Makes Us Do Dumb Things
Social media mishaps have been in the news a lot recently. On July 3, the #PlaneBae saga erupted on Twitter, was celebrated briefly, then quickly condemned as an invasion of privacy. The same day, a trio of adventure YouTubers tragically died when they were swept over a waterfall in British Columbia. On July 6, an […]
Read MoreAI Weekly: The growing importance of clear AI ethics policies
A little over a week after the fervor surrounding Google’s involvement in the Department of Defense’s Project Maven, an autonomous drone program, showed signs of abating, another machine learning controversy returned to the headlines: local law enforcement deploying Amazon’s Rekognition, a computer vision service with facial recognition capabilities. In a letter addressed to Amazon CEO […]
Read MoreWilbur Ross’s Financial Shenanigans Should Be a Massive Scandal
Days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Office of Government Ethics released an agreement with Wilbur Ross, then the nominee to head the Commerce Department, in which the octogenarian tycoon agreed to divest from a significant number of his holdings and step down from the boards of over 20 companies in which he held financial interests. […]
Read MoreWilbur Ross’s Financial Shenanigans Should Be a Massive Scandal
Days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Office of Government Ethics released an agreement with Wilbur Ross, then the nominee to head the Commerce Department, in which the octogenarian tycoon agreed to divest from a significant number of his holdings and step down from the boards of over 20 companies in which he held financial interests. […]
Read MoreThe future of AI relies on a code of ethics
Matthew Howard Contributor More posts by this contributor Brands, Platforms, The Live Video Labyrinth And How Everyone Can Win Facebook has recently come under intense scrutiny for sharing the data of millions of users without their knowledge. We’ve also learned that Facebook is using AI to predict users’ future behavior and selling that data to advertisers. Not surprisingly, Facebook’s business model […]
Read MoreThe New York Times compares the internment of children to swear words used by internment opponents
And it is a symptom of the corruption in our discourse that brought us to this point, and to those recent others. It is widely taken for granted, among the punditry that grace us with their omnipresent wisdom on the television sets, that coarse language is a sin of equal magnitude to the advocacy for […]
Read MoreThe Jarvanka Family Motto: ‘Grifters Gotta Grift’
The WaPo tells us that Jar-Jarvanka, the millionaire grifters, made at least $82 million last year. How’s that, we wondered. Didn’t they give it all up? I seem to recall that Fratsputin’s felonious Pa even recently talked about how the couple was making YUGE sacrifices to their financial well being to patriotically serve their country […]
Read MoreGoogle introduces ethical standards for AI use
Just earlier today, Google’s Sundar Pichai laid down the company’s new AI manifesto. While it may just seem like a more verbose response to the recent military AI contracts, in many ways, the new set of principles are more accurately the answer to questions initially raised last year by Sergey Brin in Alphabet’s 2017 Founders’ […]
Read MoreThe tangled relationship between AI and human rights
It was a pleasant 21 degrees in New York when computers defeated humanity — or so many people thought. That Sunday in May 1997, Garry Kasparov, a prodigal chess grandmaster and world champion, was beaten by Deep Blue, a rather unassuming black rectangular computer developed by IBM. In the popular imagination, it seemed like humanity […]
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