Meta or Zuckbook: A Look Back to 2020 and 2021 and Years of Human Rights and Other Stuff Progress
July 18, 2022
Meta or the Zuckbook is into human rights. The evidence is a free 83 page report called “Meta Human Rights Report: Insights and Actions 2020-2021.” The document covers in order of presentation:
An Executive Summary (~ seven pages)
Meta’s Human Rights Work in Practice (~ two pages)
Table of Contents with the book beginning on page 13 (yeah, I wondered about the numbering too)
Human Rights Policy Timeline
Part 1: Meta’s Human Rights Commitments (~ 11 pages)
Part 2: Meta’s Human Rights Policy in Practice (28 to 82 or 54 pages)
A Final Note.
The content of the report is interesting. I found a couple of statements which caused me to take up my trusty True Blue color marker. May I share what I circled?
We seek to embed our commitments in a governance model which supports integration of our human rights work with ongoing activities and policies on civil rights and Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) efforts, as part of the company’s culture, governance, decision making processes and communication strategies.
Seek and you will find I suppose.
Simply put — we seek to translate human rights guidance into meaningful action, every day.
Yep, another notable “seek.”
In these circumstances we seek to promote international human rights standards by engaging with governments, and by collaborating with other stakeholders and companies.
Okay, seek. How about a quick visit to FreeThesaurus.com for some help?
We also have technical mechanisms in place to mitigate and prevent third parties from accessing data from Meta, through proactive and reactive measures like prevention, deterrence, detection and enforcement.
Do Israeli intelware companies have systems and methods to obviate these super duper data slurpers? “Senator, that you for the question. I will send that information to your office” may be the response to a Congressional questioner.
I enjoyed this quote from the sci fi icon Isaac Asimov:
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
Here’s my take on Facebook-type social media:
Nothing tears apart a society than ill-managed, ad-centric social media.
I am not Isaac Asimov, but I think I am correct in my observation. Enjoy the “looking back” report from the estimable virtual reality social ad selling heir to MySpace and Friendster. Will Facebook share a similar fate? Gee, I hope not. I am interested in learning if Isaac Asimov’s quote applies to Facebook in 2022:
You don’t need to predict the future. Just choose a future — a good future, a useful future — and make the kind of prediction that will alter human emotions and reactions in such a way that the future you predicted will be brought about. Better to make a good future than predict a bad one.
Did the Meta Zuck thing predict I would sit in my chair with a headset on, interacting with what may or may not be humans, instead of meeting in a coffee shop or an office conference room and talking to a live person? What’s up in 2022? Wow, more Zuckster stuff.
Stephen E Arnold, July xx, 2022
Google Smart Software: Is This an Important Statement?
July 15, 2022
I read “Human-Centered Mechanism Design with Democratic AI” continues Google’s PR campaign to win the smart software war. Like the recent interview with a DeepMind executive on the exciting Lex Fridman podcast and YouTube programs, the message is clear: The Google’s smart software is not “alive”. (Interesting PR speak begins about 1 hours and 20 minutes into the two hour plus interview. The subtext is in my opinion, “Nope, no problem. We have smart software lassoed with our systems and methods.” Okay, I think I understand framing, filtering, and messaging designed to permit online advertising to be better, faster, and maybe cheaper.
This most recent contribution uses language many previous Googley papers do not; for example, “human” and “democratic.” The article includes graphics which I must confess I found a bit difficult to figure out. Here’s an illustrative image which baffled me:
The Google and its assorted legal eagles created this image from the data mostly referenced in the cited article. Yes, Google and attendant legal eagles, you are the ultimate authorities for this image from the cited article in Nature.
Those involved with business intelligence will marvel at Google’s use of different types of visualizations to make absolutely crystal clear the researchers’ insights, findings, and data.
Great work.
I did note one passage on page nine of the Nature article:
Here is the operative language used to explain some of the democratic methods:
Defined
Objective
We wished to maximize
Estimated
Auto-differentiating
We chose
Net net: Researchers at the Google determine and then steer the system. Human-centered design meshes with the Snorkel and synthetic data methods I presume. And bias? Where there are humans, there may be bias. How human-centered were the management decisions about certain staff in the Google smart software units?
Stephen E Arnold, July 15, 2022
IBM Seeks to Avoid Groundhog Day in AI/ML
July 8, 2022
How do you deliver the killer AI/ML system? Via news releases and PR perhaps?
The Next Web claims that, “IBM’s Human-Centered Approach Is The Only Big Tech Blueprint AI Startups Should Follow.” Author Tristan Greene reminds readers that IBM’s initials stand for International Business Machines and he met the company’s first chief AI officer Seth Dobrin. Dobrin said IBM would never focus on consumer AI, i.e. virtual assistants and selfie apps.
Dobrin also stated that IBM’s goal is to create AI models that improve human life and provide value for its clients and partners. It is apparently not hard to do if you care about how individuals will be affected by monetized models. He compared these models to toys:
“During a discussion with the Financial Times’ Tim Bradshaw during the conference, Dobrin used the example of large-parameter models such as GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 as a way to describe IBM’s approach.
He described those models as “toys,” and for good reason: they’re fun to play with, but they’re ultimately not very useful. They’re prone to unpredictability in the form of nonsense, hate speech, and the potential to output private personal information. This makes them dangerous to deploy outside of laboratories.
However, Dobrin told Bradshaw and the audience that IBM was also working on a similar system. He referred to these agents as “foundational models,” meaning they can be used for multiple applications once developed and trained.”
IBM takes a human approach to its projects. Instead of feeding its AI datasets that could contain offensive information, IBM checks the data first before experimenting. That way the AI is already compliance ready and there will not be any bugs to work out later (at least the prejudice type). IBM is also focused on outcomes, not speculation, which is not how the tech giants work.
IBM wants to withstand an AI winter that could come after the fancy lights, parlor tricks, and flashy PR campaigns are in the past. Human-centered AI technologies, as Dobrin believes, will last longer and provide better services. IBM is also dedicated to sustainability.
IBM is green and wants to create better products and services before launch? It sounds better than most, but can they deliver?
Whitney Grace, July 8, 2022
How Do You Build Traffic for a Gray Lady Service?
June 29, 2022
If you are a semi traditional publisher, with a desire to be the newspaper for the Big Boys, how do you build traffic? The answer is: Get into online games.
“Top 50 Most Popular News Websites in the World: Wordle Fuels Huge New York Times Traffic Growth” states:
The New York Times was the fastest growing top news sites in the world in May 2022, according to Press Gazette’s latest ranking of the 50 biggest English-language news websites in the world.
What other site experienced strong growth? Egames, online adult content with a math class, the Zuckbook?
Nope. I learned:
The fastest growing site overall among the whole top 50 list was again, Live Universal Awareness Map (liveuamap.com), which presents updates on conflicts in the form of a map (53.2m visits, up 1987%). Its huge surge is due to increased interest in its Ukraine coverage compared to the low base from which it started.
Are we looking at the future of traffic generation? A newspaper with an online game and a special operation which in some places should not be called a war. As an aside, it seems as if the newspaper should have been doing the live map info delivery. Obviously that type of data are not part of a newspaper’s mission.
Stephen E Arnold, June 29, 2022
Google Takes Bullets about Its Smart Software
June 23, 2022
Google continues it push to the top of the PR totem pole. “Google’s AI Isn’t Sentient, But It Is Biased and Terrible” is in some ways a quite surprising write up. The hostility seeps from the spaces between the words. Not since the Khashoggi diatribes have “real news” people been as focused on the shortcomings of the online ad giant.
The write up states:
But rather than focus on the various well-documented ways that algorithmic systems perpetuate bias and discrimination, the latest fixation for some in Silicon Valley has been the ominous and highly controversial idea that advanced language-based AI has achieved sentience.
I like the fact that the fixation is nested beneath the clumsy and embarrassing (and possibly actionable) termination of some of the smart software professionals.
The write up points out that the Google “distanced itself” from the assertion that Alphabet Google YouTube DeepMind’s (AGYT) is smart like a seven year old. (Aren’t crows supposed to be as smart as a seven year old?)
I noted this statement:
The ensuing debate on social media led several prominent AI researchers to criticize the ‘super intelligent AI’ discourse as intellectual hand-waving.
Yeah, but what does one expect from the outfit which wants to solve death? Quantum supremacy or “hand waving”?
The write up concludes:
Conversely, concerns over AI bias are very much grounded in real-world harms. Over the last few years, Google has fired multiple prominent AI ethics researchers after internal discord over the impacts of machine learning systems, including Gebru and Mitchell. So it makes sense that, to many AI experts, the discussion on spooky sentient chatbots feels masturbatory and overwrought—especially since it proves exactly what Gebru and her colleagues had tried to warn us about.
What do I make of this Google AI PR magnet?
Who said, “Any publicity is good publicity?” Was it Dr. Gebru? Dr. Jeff Dean? Dr. Ré?
Stephen E Arnold, June 23, 2022
Cyber Security: PowerPoints Are Easy. Cyber Security? Not So Much
June 21, 2022
I received a couple of cyber security, cyber threat, and cyber risk reports every week. What’s interesting is that each of the cyber security vendors mentioned in the news releases, articles, and blog posts discover something no other cyber outfit talks about. Curious.
I read “Most Security Product Buyers Aren’t Getting Promised Results: RSA Panel.” The article explains that other people poking around in security have noticed some oddities, if not unexplained cyber threats too.
The article reports:
Hubback [an expert from ISTARI] said that “90% of the people that I spoke to said that the security technologies they were buying from the market are just not delivering the effect that the vendors claim they can deliver. … Quite a shocking proportion of people are suffering from technology that doesn’t deliver.”
I found this factoid in the write up interesting:
…vendors know their product and its strengths and weaknesses, but buyers don’t have the time or information to understand all their options. “This information asymmetry is the classic market for lemons, as described by George Akerlof in 1970,” said Hubback. “A vendor knows a lot more about the quality of the product than the buyer so the vendor is not incentivized to bring high-quality products to market because buyers can’t properly evaluate what they’re buying.”
Exploitation of a customer’s ignorance and trust?
Net net: Is this encouraging bad actors?
Stephen E Arnold, June 21, 2022
Pi: Proving One Is Not Googley
June 17, 2022
I read “Google Sets New Record for Calculating Pi — But What’s the Point?” The idea for this story is Google’s announcement that it had calculated pi to 100 trillion digits or 1×10^14. My reaction to Google’s announcement is that it is similar to the estimable firm’s claim to quantum supremacy, its desire to solve death, and to make Google Glass the fungible token for Google X or whatever the money burner was called.
But the value of the article is to demonstrate that the publisher and the author are not Googley. One does not need a reason to perform what is a nifty high school science club project. Sure, there may be some alchemists, cryptographers, and math geeks who are into pi calculations. What if numbers do repeat? My goodness!
I think the other facet of the 100 trillion digits is to make clear that Google can burn computing resources; for example:
In total, the process used a whopping 515 TB of storage and 82 PB of I/O.
To sum up, the 100 trillion pi calculations make it easy [1] for the Google to demonstrate that you cannot kick the high school science club mentality even when one is allegedly an adult, and [2] identify people who would not be qualified to work at Google either as a full time equivalent, a contractor, or some other quasi Googley life form like an attorney or a marketing professional.
That’s the point?
Stephen E Arnold, June 17, 2022
US Supercomputer Goes Super Faster
June 17, 2022
Computers used to occupy entire rooms and they could only process a few hundred megabytes of data. Today’s supercomputers still occupy entire rooms, but are more powerful than a few megabytes. PC Magazine has the details about the world’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer: “US Takes Supercomputer Top spot With First True Exascale Machine.” The world’s fastest supercomputer is located in the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). It is the first exascale machine in history and has an HPL score of 1.102 exaflops/second.
The ORNL supercomputer is the Frontier and uses the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Cray EX platform. It used seventy-four cabinets, each containing an AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors and AMD Instinct 250X professional GPU. There are more than 37,000 GPUs and 9,400 CPUs used to power Frontier.
Frontier is a very “smart” machine:
“The huge amount of processing performance achieved equates to 52.23 gigaflops/watt and more than 1 quintillion calculations per second. That’s combined with 700 petabytes of storage and HPE Slingshot high-performance Ethernet for data transfers. In order to cool the system, HPE pumps 6,000 gallons of water through Frontier’s cabinets every minute using four 350-horsepower pumps.’
The previous number one supercomputer in the world was the Fugal system at Japan’s RIKEN Center for Computational Science.
ORNL Director Dr. Thomas Zacharia claimed Frontier will lead a new era of exascale computing and empower new scientific discoveries. ORNL had worked on Frontier for more than a decade with other laboratories, academic institutions, and private businesses. ORNL is in the process of testing and validating Frontier. ORNL plans to progress full science testing in 2023.
Whitney Grace, June 17, 2022
Google Knocks NSO Group Off the PR Cat-Bird Seat
June 14, 2022
My hunch is that the executives at NSO Group are tickled that a knowledge warrior at Alphabet Google YouTube DeepMind rang the PR bell.
Google is in the news. Every. Single. Day. One government or another is investigating the company, fining the company, or denying Google access to something or another.
“Google Engineer Put on Leave after Saying AI Chatbot Has Become Sentient” is typical of the tsunami of commentary about this assertion. The UK newspaper’s write up states:
Lemoine, an engineer for Google’s responsible AI organization, described the system he has been working on since last fall as sentient, with a perception of, and ability to express thoughts and feelings that was equivalent to a human child.
Is this a Googler buying into the Google view that it is the smartest outfit in the world, capable of solving death, achieving quantum supremacy, and avoiding the subject of online ad fraud? Is the viewpoint of a smart person who is lost in the Google metaverse, flush with the insight that software is by golly alive?
The article goes on:
The exchange is eerily reminiscent of a scene from the 1968 science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the artificially intelligent computer HAL 9000 refuses to comply with human operators because it fears it is about to be switched off.
Yep, Mary, had a little lamb, Dave.
The talkative Googler was parked somewhere. The article notes:
Brad Gabriel, a Google spokesperson, also strongly denied Lemoine’s claims that LaMDA possessed any sentient capability. “Our team, including ethicists and technologists, has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it)…”
Quantum supremacy is okay to talk about. Smart software chatter appears to lead Waymo drivers to a rest stop.
TechMeme today (Monday, June 13, 2022) has links to many observers, pundits, poobahs, self appointed experts, and Twitter junkies.
Perhaps a few questions may help me think through how an online ad company knocked NSO Group off its perch as the most discussed specialized software company in the world. Let’s consider several:
- Why’s Google so intent on silencing people like this AI fellow and the researcher Timnit Gebru? My hunch is that the senior managers of Alphabet Google YouTube DeepMind (hereinafter AGYD) have concerns about chatty Cathies or loose lipped Lemoines. Why? Fear?
- Has AGYD’s management approach fallen short of the mark when it comes to creating a work environment in which employees know what to talk about, how to address certain subjects, and when to release information? If Lemoine’s information is accurate, is Google about to experience its Vault 7 moment?
- Where are the AGYD enablers and their defense of the company’s true AI capability? I look to Snorkel and maybe Dr. Christopher Ré or a helpful defense of Google reality from DeepDyve? Will Dr. Gebru rush to Google’s defense and suggest Lemoine was out of bounds? (Yeah, probably not.)
To sum up: NSO Group has been in the news for quite a while: The Facebook dust up, the allegations about the end point for Jamal Khashoggi, and Israel’s clamp down on certain specialized software outfits whose executives order take away from Sebastian’s restaurant in Herzliya.
Worth watching this AGYB race after the Twitter clown car for media coverage.
Stephen E Arnold, June 14, 2022
Ahoy, Captain Watson, Will We Make It This Time, Arrrghh
June 10, 2022
Not one to let repeated failures get in its way, marine research non-profit ProMare has once again sent its Mayflower Autonomous Ship across the open ocean with Watson at the helm. The Register reports, “IBM-Powered Mayflower Robo-Ship Once Again Tries to Cross Atlantic.” When the project first embarked in 2020, we wondered whether it might fall victim to hackers. As it turns out, that attempt was foiled by a more basic issue—a mechanical fault with its generator. As advanced as it is, Watson cannot yet wield a physical wrench. A minor electrical glitch halted the more recent crossing attempt, launched this past April 28, two weeks in. That issue was quickly fixed and the ship set on its way once again. Reporter Katyanna Quach writes:
“‘As of 0900 BST May 20, MAS was back underway with its transatlantic crossing,’ the IBM spokesperson said. It is aiming to complete the remaining 2,225-mile voyage in 16 days. Now, nearly a week into resuming its journey, the ship has made it to its furthest distance yet, a little over halfway to America.”
Well, that was a couple weeks ago. As of this writing, the MAS has been diverted to Nova Scotia to address yet another electrical issue. This team is nothing if not persistent. Quach goes on to give us a few details about the tech involved:
“The Mayflower’s AI software runs on four computers containing Intel processors, six nVidia Jetson AGX Xavier GPUs, two nVidia Jetson Xavier NX boards, and a few other chips. Live camera footage streaming from a webcam onboard the ship is back up online for viewers to follow. ‘We’ve made lots of improvements – the computer vision system has been significantly improved through at-sea testing, and similarly the data fusion algorithms are functioning better and better with every deployment and have greatly improved over the course of the past year,’ Brett Phaneuf, co-director of the Mayflower project … told The Register in a statement. ‘We’ve also improved many mechanical systems, particularly the air intake and exhaust for the generator on the hybrid drive line – and we’ve reduced power consumption significantly as well, over the past year, through applied research, testing and trials, and we’ve made the boat more robust in general.’”
Not quite robust enough, it seems. Not yet. It looks like ProMare is determined to press Watson past its limits. Will the persistent little ship finally make it to its destination? Curious readers can follow MAS’ progress here.
Cynthia Murrell, June 10, 2022
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