Workshop on Inequalities in the age of AI, what they are, how they work and what we can do about them - 19/11 - Brussels

Hey, almost done with first skeleton draft of what we discussed.

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connected_fridge I’m working on these forms of conceptualisations of technologies with a view to illustrating /where/ and /who/ does /what/ and /how/. The particular attachment concerns consumer worries with connected fridges - it’s a sketch/draft.

I was put in a pickle with the physical and datalink layers, because there’s actually a bit of information transmitted already at/for the physical layer. But ok.

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the idea is to be able to put in where different features are/could be standardized, or perhaps even map to vendors/value chains. there’s a universe out there waiting to be OSI:fied.

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Ok - do I understand correctly?

For the purpose of this discussion/session we need to be quite specific so as to have a set of “case studies”. We pick a set of specific well documented stories/ incident where certain injustices manifested and map out the connections between the where/what/when/how of technologies involved…and the who/where/when/how of decision making mechanisms or processes involved.

The visuals you sent are a proposed way to approach/structure the discussion.

Yes?

For the purpose of this discussion/session we need to be quite specific so as to have a set of “case studies”. We pick a set of specific well documented stories/ incident where certain injustices manifested and map out the connections between the where/what/when/how of technologies involved…and the who/where/when/how of decision making mechanisms or processes involved.

Ah, sorry. I posted the picture because it looks nice (to lighten up the mood). On the stories we need to document, I believe it’s easier to group stories by forum (where an event takes place), since it is the nature of the forum that determines what the future courses of actions are.

That said, OSI layer conceptualisations can be used to illustrate how different technologies relate to each other. Maybe a consideration for a later report? At the workshop stage focus could be on strategic issues more than graphics.

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Hi @alberto, this is an interesting issue.

P2P traffic had peaked to be 69% of total internet traffic in Germany in 2007 ( https://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/cse571-07/ftp/p2p/#study & Press Releases | ipoque )… in 2019 however, it fell to the neighbourhood of 5% ( Netflix Dominates Internet Traffic Worldwide, BitTorrent Ranks Fifth * TorrentFreak ). Similarly to make another example, despite promising radical decentralisation and the substitution of trust by algorithm-driven verification of claims, blockchains have all started meddling with mechanisms of centralised control, roughly since the 2016 DAO attack and consequent Ethereum fork, and today one sees permissioned solutions ( Home | Suscribo ), editable (!!) chains ( When Blockchain Meets the Right to be Forgotten: Technology Versus Law and Editable Blockchain : First step towards exception management | by hunny khanna | Medium ), and various experiments in quorum systems ( https://tezos.gitlab.io/master/whitedoc/voting.html and https://consensys.net/ )… all to adapt to external requirements and to fit within existing financial and regulatory models (and they were already radically less pirate and anarchic than the previous at least 2 waves of decentralised tech on internet!!), rather than because of inherent technical reflections, or visions of future societies… a clash that homoeopathically dilutes the long-term vision on the reasons of short term success?
It all seems to me to relate to how policies get informed by unknowns and believes, often transversal to the topic that is being deliberated about (e.g. P2P and the mistaken belief that sharing subtracts value to the creative industry → https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_study.pdf )

…this could be a good paper to read ahead of any effort to produce evidences for NGI → Beyond evidence versus truthiness: toward a symmetrical approach to knowledge and ignorance in policy studies | Policy Sciences

Are you calling Julia Reda on this?

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Well, hello @markomanka! :slight_smile:

Delighted to get your input – if we go ahead with this, I’ll make sure you get a proper invitation. Your exact same point was made to me by @teirdes: Europe used to have a world leadership on P2P tech (Kazaa, Pirate Bay, early Skype…), but then it regulated its own tech bleeding edge out of existence. This issue deserves its own thread, but it does advocate taking a hard look at industrial tech policy in the EU… what do you think?

I am not sure what Julia is up to these days. I heard she did not run for a second mandate, which I interpret as being fed up with the whole dance. Perhaps you have other information?

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I agree we need to get deep into the industrial tech policies, and overall competitive strategy design process (an awful lot of ill informed “me too” rages in EU since a decade or two) inevitably including the issue of lobbying… and I agree this investigation would be a dignified activity on its own… In reason of Paul KT & Haddad C 2019 (the last link in my previous post) however, I am not sure we can disentangle the two analyses too easily, since also your original enquiry was meant to inform future policy making… up for conversation about how to arrange the coordination of the efforts.

Concerning Julia, no… I have the same news as you, I guess… but my understanding is that she is fed up with the political side and EU parliament… not with the entire topic… and once anyone is as deep in it as she is, I cannot bring myself to believe she can simply turn away… it’s in her :slight_smile:
Anyway a message would not hurt, if we were to go through with this… :angel:

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@markomanka indeed!

Please keep sharing these as you develop them @teirdes - having visual resources (i at least finds) is very helpful for explaining how the Internet works, who is in involved, and what concerns/interests are!

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@nadia

Do reach out to this woman - >Liliana Carrillo - Ghent, Flemish Region, Belgium | Professional Profile | LinkedIn

She’s interested to be a speaker or attendee and willing to share info in her AI circles.

@nadia

She’s interested as well → https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinawunder/

Ciao Nadia,

First of all sorry for the delay, been difficult days lately for me regarding my availability outside basic work duty.

It is indeed time to launch the communication:

Ideally I would need to create an event on www.digityser.org/events that would obviously point towards here to allow people to register the way you want them to be registered etc…

wanted :
Banner image + description + Title of the event + date/hour (program format more or less)

Regarding a pre-meetup on the 10th : do you want to reschedule this ? Our place is pretty much open for this but You need to pick a date because we have a bunch of events/hackathons this week & the next one that will take most of our time.

Maybe the best would be to provide an invitation/concept about the event and we could invite all our contacts so that would avoid you to make a physical meetup just to share the format/methodology of the event ?

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ok @anon82932460 can I ask you to coordinate with @MariaEuler to get appropriate communication materials to @rmdes for digityser’s events website, as well as for posting on/via Digityser’s social media/communication channels?

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New person who’s interested → https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathalie-smuha-2aa0b071/

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cannot contact people with whom I am not already connected @anon82932460 :slight_smile: ask them to write to nadia@edgeryders.eu ?

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I need images of the main featured speakers that we have the right to use :slight_smile:

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Meanwhile I’m going to create an event on our side with the info I gather from here.
Registration link will be the festival registration page, is that ok ?

Edit : https://digityser.org/events/edgeryders-festival-workshop-on-inequalities-in-the-age-of-ai-what-they-are-how-they-work-and-what-we-can-do-about-them/

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yes

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oh yeah, @rmdes - @J_Noga wants to do a podcast interview at Digityser 2hrs before the event starts (is there some quiet room somewhere we could do it in?)

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