Category: Societal Impact

Artificial intelligence: there are problems we need to address right now, the rest is science fiction

by Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius, Marvin van Bekkum, and Djoerd Hiemstra

Everywhere you read warnings of ‘existential risks’ from artificial intelligence (AI). Some even warn that AI could wipe out humanity. The tech company OpenAI is predicting the emergence of artificial general intelligence and superintelligence, and of future AI systems that will be more intelligent than humans. Some policymakers also fear this kind of scenario.

But things are not moving that fast. ‘Artificial general intelligence’ means an AI system that, like humans, can perform a variety of different tasks. There is no such general AI at present, and even if it does come one day, creating it will take a very long time.

Many AI systems are useful. Search engines, for example, are indispensable to internet users, and are a good example of specific AI. A specific AI system can perform one task well, such as pointing people to the right website. Modern spam filters, translation software, and speech recognition software also work well thanks to specific AI.

But these are still examples of specific AI – far removed from general AI, let alone ‘superintelligence’. Humans can learn new things. AI systems cannot. What computer scientists are getting better and better at is creating general large language models that can be used for all kinds of specific AI. The same language model can be used for translation software, spam filters, and search engines. Does this mean that such a language model has general intelligence? Could it develop consciousness? Absolutely not! There is therefore no real risk of a science fiction scenario in which an AI system wipes out humanity.

This focus on existential risks distracts us from the real risks at hand, which require our attention right now. Little remains of our privacy, for example. AI systems are trained using data, lots of data. That is why AI developers, mostly big tech companies, are collecting massive amounts of data. For instance, OpenAI presumably gobbled up large sections of the web to develop ChatGPT, including personal data. Incidentally, OpenAI is quite secretive about what data it uses.

Secondly, the use of AI can lead to unfair discrimination. For example, many facial recognition systems do not work well for people with darker skin tones. In the US, the police have repeatedly arrested the wrong person because a facial recognition system wrongly identified the dark-skinned men as criminals.

Thirdly, AI systems consume incredible amounts of electricity. Training and using language models like GPT require a lot of computing power from large data centres, which guzzle energy. Finally, the power of big tech companies is only growing with the use of AI systems. Developing AI systems costs a lot of money, so as the use of AI increases, we become even more dependent on big tech companies. These kinds of risks are already here now. Let’s focus on that, and not let ourselves be distracted by the ghost of sentient AI.

Published by Radboud Recharge.

Open Search Symposium 2022

10-12 October 202 at CERN

The Open Search Symposium series (#OSSYM) provides a forum to discuss and advance the ideas and concepts of Open Internet search in Europe. This year’s #OSSYM2022 takes place at CERN and online from 10-12 October 2022. The programme is great with for instance on Monday a keynote from Tomáš “Word2Vec” Mikolov, on Tuesday a track with alternative search engines including Raphael Auphan (the CEO of Qwant), Isabel Claus (founder of the B-to-B engine thinkers.ai), and Joseph Cullhead (alexandria.org, a Swedish nonprofit organization with a low budget search engine). Wednesday has a panel discussion about the ethics of search.

[Register now via CERN]

A research agenda

Slow, content-based, federated, explainable, and fair

Access to information on the world wide web is dominated by monopolists, (Google and Facebook) that decide most of the information we see. Their business models are based on “surveillance capitalism”, that is, profiting from getting to know as much as possible about individuals that use the platforms. The information about individuals is used to maximize their engagement thereby maximizing the number of targeted advertisements shown to these individuals. Google’s and Facebook’s financial success has influenced many other online businesses as well as a substantial part of the academic research agenda in machine learning and information retrieval, that increasingly focuses on training on huge datasets, literally building on the success of Google and Facebook by using their pre-trained models (e.g. BERT and ELMo). Large pre-trained models and algorithms that maximize engagement come with many societal problems: They have been shown to discriminate minority groups, to manipulate elections, to radicalize users, and even to enable genocide. Looking forward to 2021-2027, we aim to research the following technical alternatives that do not exhibit these problems: 1) slow, content-based, learning that maximizes user satisfaction instead of fast, click-based learning that maximizes user engagement; 2) federated information access and search instead of centralized access and search; 3) explainable, fair approaches instead of black-box, biased approaches.

An Open Access Strategy for iCIS

The Dutch government has set the target that by 2020, 100% of scientific publications financed with public money must be open access. As iCIS, we are not even half way. In the Radboud Repository less than 50% of the publications by Data Science, Software Science, and Digital Security are listed as open access. The slides below make a case for a new Open Access Strategy at iCIS that involves:

  1. Putting all iCIS publications on-line after a reasonable time (as permitted by Dutch copyright law), preferably in the Radboud Repository;
  2. Encouraging so-called diamond open access publishing (where open access publications are paid by donations and volunteer work from authors, editors, peer reviewers, and web masters);
  3. Discouraging closed access as well as so-called gold open access publishing (where authors pay expensive article processing charges);
  4. Complementing the iCIS Research Data Management policy and protocol.

Presented at the iCIS strategy day on 20 October 2020.

[download slides]

Update: iCIS may participate in the You Share, We Care project.

Transitioning the Information Retrieval Literature to a Fully Open Access Model

by Djoerd Hiemstra, Marie-Francine Moens, Raffaele Perego, and Fabrizio Sebastiani

Almost all of the important literature on Information Retrieval (IR) is published in subscription-based journals and digital libraries. We argue that the lack of open access publishing in IR is seriously hampering progress and inclusiveness of the field. We propose that the IR community starts working on a road map for transitioning the IR literature to a fully, “diamond”, open access model.

Published in SIGIR Forum 54(1).

[download preprint]

NoGA: No Google Analytics

We will start a project to investigate alternatives for web analytics of Big Tech companies (Google) as part of the SIDN fonds program Je data de baas (“Mastering your data”). There are 10 projects in the program.

In this project, the Data Science group works together with the Marketing and ICT of the University to find out whether it is a serious option for Radboud University (and other medium to large-scale organizations such as municipalities and hospitals) to take Web analytics in their own hands, instead of outsourcing it to Google.

More information at: https://nogadata.nl

Beyond research and teaching: on the role of universities in our society

(a thread on Mastodon U. Twente.)

In the essay The Fragmentation of Truth danah boyd makes the following important point: To combat increasing polarisation in our society, we need to rely on organisations that actively and intentionally let people with fundamental differences work alongside one another.

Boyd mentions the military as an example of an organisation that brings together people from different social backgrounds and political views to work on a common goal. To “intentionally bridge gaps in the social graph, to intentionally connect people and communities.”

I see schools and universities as another major power to combat polarisation in our society. Our university brings together people from different backgrounds, politcal views and cultures. Creating a sense of common purpose and a sense of a university community is important to fight polarisation and populism in our society.

That’s why our campus, our study associations, our sport, cultural and other student associations, are so important. That’s also why we need democratic institutions and self-government. They do not only shape our university now, they shape our future society.

We need to work harder to shape our universty as a community. If international students feel disconnected, then we completely failed as a university, no matter how excellent our educational programs are. This U-Today story, International bachelors: psychological and social problems, breaks my heart: (“One in three non-European bachelors had study problems in the previous academic year due to psychological, medical or social circumstances.”)

Danah boyd discusses in depth how platforms like Youtube and Facebook harm our society; how they directly threaten the important role that schools and universities play in creating a peaceful society. From this view point it is clear: Youtube should not be the primary channel for our online lectures; Facebook should not be the primary channel for our events.

Finally, services like search engines may be harmful, however well-intended and well-implemented. I find this hard to say as an Information Retrieval researcher, but search is easily manipulated, and you might not want powerful search in some applications. Boyd’s concept of ‘data voids’ is really insightful. Maybe we should teach students about search engine optimization in our courses too… #FIR

How Twente may lead the fight against global heating

(a thread on Mastodon U. Twente)

I signed the Klimaatbrief Universiteiten. Our university does not have an ambitious climate agenda. A common approach among universities is lacking. With this letter, we call upon university management to develop and implement policies to drastically reduce the universities’ carbon emissions.

Frankly speaking, the policies that this letter calls for should not be controversial at all. Universities have a moral duty to work on the big problems of the world, and a duty to advance approaches that may solve these problems. In fact, the University of Twente can build a campus that is CO2 neutral now. Let me give a few examples.

Let’s build, on campus, the state-of-the-art wind mills that use generators developed at the University of Twente. The superconductors developed by Marc Dhallé and colleagues, Lighter windmills thanks to superconductivity, replace the heavy magnets inside the generators of conventional wind mills. As a result, the weight and size of the new generator is significantly reduced while at the same time, it is capable of delivering the same output power. Another advantage is the minimal use of rare earth metals.

Let’s put solar panels on every roof and turn everyday objects on campus into solar panels using luminescent solar concentrator (LSC) photovoltaic technologies that Angèle Reinders and colleagues experiment with. The typical material properties of LSCs — low cost, colorful, bendable, and transparency — offer a lot of design freedom.

Let’s use the additional energy generated on campus to generate solar fuels. This involves the direct conversion of energy from sunlight into a usable fuel (in this case, hydrogen). Using only earth-abundant materials, Han Gardeniers, Jurriaan Huskens and colleagues developed the most efficient conversion method to date: UT boosts efficiency of solar fuels.

The high school children that are on strike for the climate now will be our future students. Let’s give them the world — and the campus — they protested for.

Vacation days for societal impact

by Joe Laufer, Mariëlle Winkler, Djoerd Hiemstra, and Susanne de Gooijer (Free Spirits UniTe)

Many employees of the University of Twente spend part of their free time on volunteer projects that are directly beneficial to society. They use their expertise and professional knowledge for instance by teaching children, by lecturing students in developing countries, by supporting elderly with new technology, or by rewriting an NGO's strategic plan. These employees struggle allocating enough free time for their volunteer work, whereas others might not need all their vacations days. Our proposal is simple: Employees can take their vacation days, and give them to employees that are in need because of their volunteer work. Our proposal extends the university's vision “the entrepreneurial university” to explicitly support projects with societal impact. We envision the following steps:

  • Employees initiate projects that have societal impact and ask support of the campus community;
  • Employees can donate one or more vacation days to become part of the community, and to form a pool of additional free time, to be used by the project initiators;
  • Project initiators pitch their ideas to the community, similiar to pitches for crowd funding platforms like Kickstarter;
  • The community can vote for the projects of their choice;
  • Once enough vacations days are donated to an initiative, the project initiator can use the extra time off to carry out their initiative (in addition to the time that the employee already puts in their initiative);
  • Students can participate in projects for credits (starting with building an on-line community platform);
  • Alumni can sponsor intiatives financially, share their network, and coach the project initiators;
  • Project initiators share their experience and accomplishments to the community, for instance by blogging about their project;
  • Initiatives should be done in cooperation with an NGO.

We are proud that our proposal is accepted as one of the Living Smart Campus projects.