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Carissa Veliz’s Posts

Cross Post: Privacy is a Collective Concern: When We Tell Companies About Ourselves, We Give Away Details About Others, Too.

BY CARISSA VÉLIZ

This article was originally published in New Statesman America

A Sad Victory

I recently watched the documentary AlphaGo, directed by Greg Kohs. The film tells the story of the refinement of AlphaGo—a computer Go program built by DeepMind—and tracks the match between AlphaGo and 18-time world champion in Go Lee Sedol.

Go is an ancient Chinese board game. It was considered one of the four essential arts of aristocratic Chinese scholars. The goal is to end the game having captured more territory than your opponent. What makes Go a particularly interesting game for AI to master is, first, its complexity. Compared to chess, Go has a larger board, and many more alternatives to consider per move. The number of possible moves in a given position is about 20 in chess; in Go, it’s about 200. The number of possible configurations of the board is more than the number of atoms in the universe. Second, Go is a game in which intuition is believed to play a big role. When professionals get asked why they played a particular move, they will often respond something to the effect that ‘it felt right’. It is this intuitive quality why Go is sometimes considered an art, and Go players artists. For a computer program to beat human Go players, then, it would have to mimic human intuition (or, more precisely, mimic the results of human intuition).

Read More »A Sad Victory

Cross Post: What If Banks Were the Main Protectors of Customers’ Private Data?

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Written by Carissa Véliz Dr Carissa Véliz, Oxford Uehiro Centre research fellow, has recently published a provocative article in the Harvard Business Review: The ability to collect and exploit consumers’ personal data has long been a source of competitive advantage in the digital economy. It is their control and use of this data that has… Read More »Cross Post: What If Banks Were the Main Protectors of Customers’ Private Data?

Cross Post: Common Sense for A.I. Is a Great Idea. But it’s Harder Than it Sounds.

Written by Carissa Veliz Crosspost from Slate.  Click here to read the full article At the moment, artificial intelligence may have perfect memories and be better at arithmetic than us, but they are clueless. It takes a few seconds of interaction with any digital assistant to realize one is not in the presence of a… Read More »Cross Post: Common Sense for A.I. Is a Great Idea. But it’s Harder Than it Sounds.

Cross Post: Think Twice Before Sending Facebook Your Nude Photos: The Shadow Brokers’ Disclosures Prove Privacy and Security Are Not a Zero-Sum Game

 

Written by Dr Carissa Veliz

This article first appeared in El Pais

 

Time and again, we have been sold the story that we need to give up privacy in exchange for security. According to former NSA security consultant Ed Giorgio, ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game’—meaning that for every increase in one, there is a decrease in the other. The go-to argument to justify mass surveillance, then, is that sacrificing our privacy is necessary for government agencies to be able to protect us from the bad guys.Read More »Cross Post: Think Twice Before Sending Facebook Your Nude Photos: The Shadow Brokers’ Disclosures Prove Privacy and Security Are Not a Zero-Sum Game

Cross Post: Why you might want to think twice about surrendering online privacy for the sake of convenience

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Written by Carissa Veliz

DPhil Candidate in Philosophy, Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford

This article was originally published in The Conversation

Just a click away once you tick this too-long-to-read privacy agreement. Shutterstock

It is inconvenient to guard one’s privacy, and the better one protects it, the more inconvenience one must endure. Enjoying privacy, at a minimum, demands installing software to block tracking online, using long and different passwords for online services, remembering to turn off the WiFi and Bluetooth signals on your mobile phone when leaving the house, using cash, and so on.Read More »Cross Post: Why you might want to think twice about surrendering online privacy for the sake of convenience

The Panama Papers: How much financial privacy should the super rich be allowed to enjoy?

The Panama Papers comprise a leak of 11.5 million files from Mossack Fonseca, the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm. The leak has tainted the reputations of many celebrities, and some public officials have been forced to resign, including Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsoon, and Spanish Industry Minister José Manuel Soria.

Ramón Fonseca, Director of Mossack Fonseca, complained that his firm was the victim of “an international campaign against privacy.” At a time where privacy does seem to be under attack on all fronts, it is relevant to ask whether the super rich ought to be able to enjoy financial privacy with respect to their offshore accounts.Read More »The Panama Papers: How much financial privacy should the super rich be allowed to enjoy?

A jobless world—dystopia or utopia?

There is no telling what machines might be able to do in the not very distant future. It is humbling to realise how wrong we have been in the past at predicting the limits of machine capabilities.

We once thought that it would never be possible for a computer to beat a world champion in chess, a game that was thought to be the expression of the quintessence of human intelligence. We were proven wrong in 1997, when Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov. Once we came to terms with the idea that computers might be able to beat us at any intellectual game (including Jeopardy!, and more recently, Go), we thought that surely they would be unable to engage in activities where we typically need to use common sense and coordination to physically respond to disordered conditions, as when we drive. Driverless cars are now a reality, with Google trying to commercialise them by 2020.

Machines assist doctors in exploring treatment options, they score tests, plant and pick crops, trade stocks, store and retrieve our documents, process information, and play a crucial role in the manufacturing of almost every product we buy.

As machines become more capable, there are more incentives to replace human workers with computers and robots. Computers do not ask for a decent wage, they do not need rest or sleep, they do not need health benefits, they do not complain about how their superiors treat them, and they do not steal or laze away.

Read More »A jobless world—dystopia or utopia?

Some thoughts on reparations

Consider the following case. Imagine you inherit a fortune from your parents. With that money, you buy a luxurious house and you pay to get a good education, which later allows you to find a job where you earn a decent salary. Many years later, you find out that your parents made their fortune through a very bad act—say, defrauding someone. You also find out that the scammed person and his family lived an underprivileged life from that moment on.

What do you think you would need to do to fulfill your moral obligations?

Read More »Some thoughts on reparations

If you want to do the most good, maybe you shouldn’t work for Wall Street

Suppose you are an altruistically minded person who is adamant about doing the most good you possibly can. If you are lucky enough to have a wide range of options, what career should you choose?

Two years ago, William MacAskill, President of 80,000 hours, a non-profit organisation focused on “enabling people to make a bigger difference with their career,” suggested you steer clear of charity work and aim for Wall Street. He called this approach earning to give. A couple of days ago, MacAskill has published a blog post where he admits that heavily pushing for the idea of earning to give was “a marketing strategy,” and that, although 80,000 hours did believe that “at least a large proportion of people” should become high-earners in order to donate more money, placing so much emphasis on this idea may have been mistaken. The 80,000 hours page on earning to give now reads: “This page was last updated in 2012 and no-longer fully reflects our views.” MacAskill’s current point of view is that only a “small proportion” of people should strive to earn to give.Read More »If you want to do the most good, maybe you shouldn’t work for Wall Street