Remember when we discussed the relationship between Facebook and political events like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump? When did we keep wondering if it was possible to combat fake news on the Internet? When did we look with any amazement at the fact that countries like Russia and Iran bought social media advertising to try to polarize opinions, undermine democratic processes, or generally contribute to chaos?
Most of these problems have been understood: they are still unresolved, but perhaps in a realistic situation, today there is almost universal disdain for the presence of disinformation in the public space.
It is time to worry about other uses of technology in the political life of democracies.
Miguel Esteves Cardoso wrote a few days ago here at PÚBLICO that “technology is not responsible” and that humans are not “helpless gestures unable to control what they put in their hands.” you are right. But the question is never about potential turnips. He is, as always, very smart and sophisticated.
This is the case of those in the United States who recruit people online, using data analysis tools to select ideologically desirable people, and Build a huge database of potential public servants. The plan is that if Trump is elected, they will replace many of the current staffers, allowing Trump’s Republicans to take control of the state apparatus in an unprecedented way.
The political lines of the issue that were Narrated by the American pressDon’t care about that the news. But it is worth summarizing the process.
An organization called the Heritage Foundation, with a long history of nominating people for Republican administrations, has created a website to receive applications from those who want to serve in public office. These candidates respond to questionnaires that have more to do with political and ideological positions than with the skills a recruiter would typically consider.
In the case of candidates who may hold important positions, activity on social networks is analyzed in detail. For example, those who have spoken out online in favor of limits on the powers of the Trump presidency are excluded.
Typically, a newly elected US president nominates about four thousand people for top positions. However, Heritage’s idea is to have a database of 20,000 to 50,000 people with ideological leanings who could also hold lower positions.
In theory, the list of candidates will be available to any Republican Party president. But the choice is made to coincide with Trump’s agenda. The project is being built partly using technology from American multinational company Oracle.
To say that this is a kind of LinkedIn tailor-made for a second term for Donald Trump is, strictly speaking, a benign comparison. The database of tens of thousands of ideologically filtered potential employees ready to infiltrate the US state apparatus is a dystopia being created in plain sight. It is something that technology has only recently made widely applicable.
Artificial intelligence, the nature of truth and human amplification
My colleague Carla Pecchinino interviewed Fernando Pereira, vice president of Deep Mind, Google’s artificial intelligence company. Pereira talks about the benefits and promises of technology, as well as the risks and challenges for which there is no clear solution. These, he says with grace, are questions that keep him awake during the day with excitement, and at night with anxiety.
Two excerpts:
“What has been the biggest challenge so far? What keeps you up at night?
Typical hallucination issue [de IA] generative. This occurs when the model compresses and condenses the information it was trained on and produces a reasonable but wrong response. This is important to evaluate when we think about introducing generative AI models into products. As a journalist, how do you determine that what someone says is true? Sometimes additional investigation may be necessary. For example, consulting different sources or interviewing other people. Likewise, how can an AI system perform this verification process?
Deciding 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 adequate?“
“Want to better explain the idea of cognitive prosthetics?
They are prosthetics because there is an amplification of human capabilities. I don’t need glasses to see, but glasses magnify what I can see. The search engine expands my ability to find information. These technologies allow us to explore the space of possibilities in a way that never existed before.
I see this with my 13 year old granddaughter. “She’s a good artist, but this technology allows her to explore patterns, colors, shapes and patterns at a speed far beyond what a 13-year-old girl could have done 50 years ago.”
It’s worth reading in its entirety.
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