4.0 | General

Remember when we discussed the relationship between Facebook and political events like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump? When did we question whether it was possible to fight fake news on the Internet? When did we wonder when countries like Russia and Iran bought ads on social media to polarize opinion, undermine democratic processes, or generally contribute to chaos?

Most of these problems are integrated: they remain unresolved, but, perhaps in terms of reality, there is a general shrug of the shoulders in the presence of misinformation in the public space today.

It is time to worry about other uses of technology in the political life of a democracy.

Miguel Esteves Cardoso wrote a few days ago in PÚBLICO that “technology is not to blame” and that humans are “not a helpless turnip that cannot control what they put in their hands”. You are right. But the question is not about potential turnips. It’s as smart and sophisticated as ever.

People in the US recruit online, use data analytics tools to select ideologically desirable candidates, and Create a large database Potential public servants. If Trump is elected, the plan is to replace many of the current employees, giving Trump’s Republicans unprecedented control over the government apparatus.

The political nature of the case, this As reported in the American pressDon’t worry about this Newsletter. But it is worth summarizing the function.

A foundation called the Heritage Foundation, which has a long history of recommending candidates to Republican administrations, created a website to solicit applications from candidates seeking to serve in public office. These candidates typically answer questionnaires that relate to political and ideological positions rather than the skills the recruiter sees.

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In the case of candidates holding key positions, activity on social networks is analyzed in detail. For example, those who spoke online in support of limits for a Trump presidency were excluded.

Typically, a newly elected US president nominates 4,000 people for high office. However, Heritage’s idea is to have a database of 20,000 to 50,000 ideologically aligned individuals.

In theory, the list of candidates is available to any Republican leader. But the election is being held in line with Trump’s agenda. In part, the project is being built with technology from American multinational corporation Oracle.

To say it’s a kind of LinkedIn tailored to a second Donald Trump term is, strictly speaking, an innocuous comparison. A database of tens of thousands of employees is ideologically filtered and ready to infiltrate the US government apparatus. And technology of its scale has only recently become possible.

AI, the nature of reality and human augmentation
My colleague Carla Pequenino conducted an interview with Fernando Pereira, Vice President of DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence company. Pereira both talks about the technology’s benefits and promises, as well as addressing the risks and challenges for which the solution is not obvious. These, he graciously says, are the questions that keep him awake during the day with excitement and with anxiety at night.

Two parts:

What has been the biggest challenge so far? What keeps you up at night?
The problem of model illusion [de IA] creating This occurs when a model summarizes and suppresses the information it was trained on, producing a plausible but incorrect answer. This is important to evaluate as we think about introducing generative AI models into products. As a journalist, how do you determine if someone is telling the truth? Sometimes additional investigation may be required. For example, consulting different sources or interviewing others. Likewise, how can an AI system perform this verification process?

How to train AI to be skeptical and verify what it says is a practical and philosophical question. What is the nature of truth? What is enough?

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Would you like to better explain this idea of ​​cognitive prosthetics?
They are artificial organs because of the proliferation of human capabilities. I don’t need glasses to see, but glasses magnify what I see. A search engine expands my ability to find information. These technologies allow us to explore a space of possibilities like never before.

Watching this with my 13 year old granddaughter. She’s a good artist, but this technology allows her to explore shapes, colors, patterns and styles at a much faster pace than a 13-year-old could 50 years ago.”

Totally worth reading.

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