Condivido questo articolo di Meredith Whittaker sulla cattura industriale della ricerca in IA, pubblicato nella rivista dell'ACM Interactions.
The steep cost of capture https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/november-december-2021/the-steep-cost-of-capture "Big tech’s control over AI resources made universities and other institutions dependent on these companies, creating a web of conflicted relationships that threaten academic freedom and our ability to understand and regulate these corporate technologies." (...) "In addition to punishing dissent and denigrating research they find threatening, tech companies are working to co-opt and neutralize critique. They do this in part by funding and elevating their weakest critics, often institutions and coalitions that focus on so-called AI ethics, and frame issues of tech power and dominance as abstract governance questions that take the tech industry's current form as a given and AI's proliferation as inevitable. In parallel, tech firms also champion technocratic remedies such as "AI bias bounties" and fairness fixits that stage tech-enabled discrimination as a problem of bad code and "buggy" engineering [15]. Such approaches make great PR. They also serve to cast elite engineers as the arbiters of "bias," while structurally excluding scholars and advocates who don't have computer science training, but whose focus on the racialized power asymmetries and political economy of AI are essential for understanding and addressing AI harms." (...) "To begin, scholars, advocates, and policymakers who produce and rely on tech-critical work must confront and name the dynamic of tech capture, co-optation, and compromise head-on, and soon. This means incorporating reflexive critiques of the conditions and of knowledge creation, and the compromises and trade-offs faced by knowledge workers over whom interested institutions have power. Given the politics of collegial proximity that inform academic prestige networks while working to blur the lines between academic and industry workers, this is certain to be uncomfortable. But naming these dynamics is the only way to address them and to stage questions that allow us to envision and demand alternative futures." -- Antonio A. Casilli Professor, Telecom Paris-Institut Polytechnique de Paris Member, Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation (CNRS) Associate Member, LACI-IIAC (EHESS) Associate researcher, Weizenbaum-Institut, Berlin Member, Scholarly council UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2) Faculty Fellow, Nexa Center for Internet & Society *We respect your right to disconnect. This email send time is due to my own workflow efficiency. You are in no obligation to take action or reply to it outside your office hours.* _______________________________________________ nexa mailing list nexa@server-nexa.polito.it https://server-nexa.polito.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nexa
