#gss2024 — Public Fediverse posts

"Microsoft — battered by antitrust scrutiny throughout the 1990s — has emerged as one of the most sophisticated tech lobbyists in Washington, increasingly seeking to shape the future of AI regulation."

I'd be a lot happier if Microsoft were paying tax in every country from which they derive value, not sending Bill Gates to G7 backrooms for deals. #GSS2024

Biden touts Microsoft AI center on site of Trump’s failed Foxconn
#GiftArticle #janesville (book) #racine #wisconsin
https://wapo.st/44yoZjS

Qian raises that the EU is sideing too much with the US, and then says the US & China need to be the ones working on defeating AGI :-/ Zenner says that actually AI is leading as an area that is well harmonised, and he's also impressed with the UNESCO work in this area. Qian some companies they want to involve are sanctioned by the US. #GSS2024

I take a turn on AGI, Cass-Beggs says they are NOT trying to let the companies off the hook or make the AGI responsible for itself. They take my point that right now US legislation or lack of enforcement are allowing big tech to be deliberately ignorant of how their systems work. Kai Zenner says the #AIA should fix this, I hope so too. #GSS2024 #AIAct #AIRegulation

Ariana Spring semi-announces a coming decentralised oversight board for climate AI. Demonstrating verified status & auditability.

Sergio Genovesi: chair already again says about making it safe. Fortunately Sergoi starts by debunking that we are trying to teach ethics to machines, we are looking at how to use them, and also how to innovate. He talks about blocking and taking over from systems which the AGI guys will no doubt laugh at. But I do think we need "chinese firewalls" to keep out digital services that refuse to comply with local digital legislation. #AIEthics #GSS2024

Qian Xiao #GSS2024 Chinese measures are argh forgot the word basically intermediate, know they will update them and maybe solidify after watching. They are also trying to be inclusive and to involve all countries. IAEA like, or she even mentions pugwash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugwash_Conferences_on_Science_and_World_Affairs she suggests letting hinton and bengio talk to each other. [I'd say twitter is the contemporary pugwash, or at least more recent.]

Ariana Spring: (chair is David Timis) EQTY Lab is dedicated to helping EVERYOE create transparent, safe AI. The smartest and safest AI will be collaborative, you need more efficient ways to do that though. Multilateralism can play a large role in democratising access to data, power, compute, can buffer against these more centralised systems. #GSS2024 Her model outperformed a larger Meta one :-)

Zenner: there's an issue with the cost of compliance. They have hopefully made this lower with standards (?? Not sure how, but the costs are in fact pretty low https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/8nzb4.html #AIA #GSS2024 he points out too that the #DMA will take care of a lot of the "AGI" problems Cass-Beggs talked about. He thinks the capacity to adjust the legislation is key as per LLM

Kai Zenner: everyone has complaints about the #AIAct #AIA. The EP most worrie s they didn't create enough clarity around legal liability. But they did a great job with future proofing the legislation. Building the act out of vague principles makes it easier to cover new risks and opportunities, but still in the end specific enough with secondary legisation: guidelines, delegated acts. Hopefully with a quick review there would be any needed additions. #GSS2024.

I'm more on page also about the importance of redistribution and transnational governance. He thinks there may be a greatly growing pie. But real risks: misuese to create widespread harm – expanding access to power by bad as well as good actors, but then he goes off the AGI rails. [I'm not saying we won't lose control of AI programs, in fact I'm saying we have already done that and the way to fix that is to hold companies to account for releasing safe products.] #GSS2024

Last panel #AIRegulation only about 20 people think this is more important than listening to Bill Gates talk about inequality for 10 minutes. And... one of them is talking about the 7 levels of #AGI and the extreme race dynamics between large firms (Duncan Cass-Beggs). I like that he mentions maybe we already have AGI well yeah if you want to define it that way https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2018/05/living-with-agi.html #GSS2024

Interesting – Dow talks about moving away from data towards tokens being exchanged, binaries about e.g. your age. Kind of understandable from a legal perspective but sounds pretty impoverished from an ML/AI perspective. #GSS2024

Dow: We have now many custodians/ trusted institutions, we need to put incentives in place to keep them doing the right things by their stakeholders / customers. It's about decision enablement, NOT about trading the data. On its own, data is not worth much. But if it's getting verified by customers, if we add context & intent, then the constituents can produce small data that is highly valuable. #GSS2024 #AIEthics #dataTrust

Katryna Dow is talking now. She and I were on the IEEE #AIEthics project together, and she was really complaining about people talking about the people talking about selling off our data. Now she's talking perfect sense about getting the tools right and transparency and the good financial laws we're seeing in some jurisdictions e.g. EU (AFAIK also UK). Need to be able to read, mine, & control the data. #GSS2024

Javier Ruiz Diaz explains he's from Consumer International so has Brazil & Hong Kong as clients, not just Europe. Unfortunately like Twomey as far as I can tell he's saying "This must be good because citizens really need it" which is another form of my partner's least favourite "argument" "That can't be true, because that would be bad." #GSS2024

Twomey talks about the speed we need, and that there's political acceptance, and lots of European systems underway being built. chair: "Advisors being built to negotiate on behalf of citizens." [Jack Dorsey said about twitter "the biggest mistake we made was making tools for controlling our users experience, rather than making tools for our users to control their own experience". #GSS2024

Nico Aspinall does financial services, says they're complex and people feel guilt yet don't sign the forms to fix things. Often your employer puts you into a system. Who collected the data? Often where you went where you were young (? clubs/concerts? schools/doctors?)
#GSS2024
Paul Twomey moved from moderator to the panel, and is now also saying "gee this is important, and we need something incorruptible." Deregulation often doesn't help those who you expect it to though (he's been through 2.)

The main business of the panel seems to be a GIDE report, global initiative for digital empowerment. They want to "engage experts" via, you guessed it, "expert agents" meaning AI. There's some great people on the panel though so hopefully I'll get less skeptical as it goes along #GSS2024

Roberts now talking about irretrievable loss, we've lost island, when we start losing countries and languages? Er, we do that all the time, not to trivialise that but we should acknowledge it. #GSS2024
Similarly Adriana Carvalho "if you cannot save all, nobody will be saved" but we're losing people daily.

I'm pretty sure that Debra Roberts
Professor
University of KwaZulu-Natal
​(South Africa) just said that the world is still subsidising fossil feul industry at $7.5T. If that's true, then I don't understand how Sholz could say there's no way public money could address the climate transition? Maybe I got the numbers wrong, but I thought itwas like 30T over 20 years or something. Ah, 100-300T in 26 years. So OK we have the money then.

#GSS2024

Great point from the floor: what if you understood that by trading / selling our data that we were giving up all our other rights away at the same time that depend on it. It enables freedom of religion, health, etc. #GSS2024 I would have applauded but he asked a second question.

#AGI is doomed. The countries that allow companies to abdicate their responsibility to know & control their businesses products –that allow a narrative fiction to become a legal fiction– will ultimately not be able to sustain their economies & the corporations behind each "AGI." #GSS2024

This panel doesn't seem to understand that you can't sell parts of yourself. Your data cannot be for sale. #GSS2024

Sarah Nicole: Privacy is too undefined to figure out prices for it. Oh, no, she wants to see the price by what people pay. But there is rampant speculation in this area, I doubt a bubble would actually give accurate price / value information. #AIEthics #GSS2024

There is no political 2/3 majority to overcome the debt brake in Germany. We need to keep the euro stable.
Thoms #GSS2024
Can we use Russian frozen funds? Doesn't DE resist that? No, DE is happy to use the PROCEEDS from the frozen assets, very open to that [he totally doesn't want to talk about using the assets themselves. Is that really the German perspective, or the FDP one? non-rhetorical question, let me know if you know.]

Thoms #GSS2024 DE are the only G7 country actually meeting its 0.7 contribution, some other money also like €10B. Thoms agrees with Scholz that public money will not be enough, we need to leverage private money using public money. DE is contributing new hybrid capital to the world bank, first country to do that. There is also blended finance. (Wow I'm glad he isn't Lindner, way more interesting.)

"I never thought I would say this but I have to apologise for not being Christian Lindner –
Heiko Thoms
State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Finance, who was given only 15 minutes notice and is now on stage. #gss2024 Apparently he was in the room when the SDGs were signed. Of course Germany would prefer not to spend the €30B it has to fighting the Russian war of aggression, this has undermined the SDG donations.

we need to remember the charter we all agree on of UN, territorial integrity is nota double standard. Ruissia has caused food and finance unstability and climate damange, BRICS should support us.

UN rules apply also in Israel, to both sides.

Wow, the SDP come up with the best speeches. It's just bizarre. (I've also been impressed by Hubertus Heil) #GSS2024

[quick notes, mostly for myself] #gss2024 #Scholz

There is no going back to a fossil fuel economy.

Partnership on international infrastructure

China is a main creditor

Germany supports the policy that more processesing happens in the countries where raw materilas come from [hope this applies to AI & Data]

If there’s really a security risk @ #GSS2024 I feel like it was borne by us trying to get out and in to the room again for this moment, but now we’re back.

Quentin Parrinello of the EU Tax Observatory talks about this tax thing #GSS2024 We do have successes in eliminating tax evasion, we have an international system in place to track offshore assets. So now we have also another important precedent, 140 countries have signed up for the minimum tax framework. Someone really talking about solutions.