The Catalan Data Protection Authority (APDCAT) has called this week, as part of the celebration of the Four Years From Now (4YFN) event, at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), to promote an ethical look at the development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications, in order to prevent this increasingly present technology from having negative consequences for people.
In this sense, the APDCAT has organized the session ‘Artificial Intelligence. An Ethical Overview’, at the MWC which was held in Barcelona from February 28 to March 3, to analyze the challenges of implementing AI technologies, and highlight some of the dangers this technology can pose: discrimination, inappropriate use of facial recognition, and unethical practices in e-commerce, among others.
The director of the APDCAT, Meritxell Borràs i Solé, opened the session, which included the intervention of Ricardo Baeza, Director of Research at the Institute of Experiential AI at Northeastern University, Silicon Valley, and a member of the DATA Lab at Khoury College of Computer Sciences, as well as other experts in the field.
The session served to address the state of this technology, learn about the relevant regulations, cultural differences, cognitive biases, and also to discuss what society can do to meet these challenges in the near future.
During his speech, Borràs spoke about the opportunities and also the risks involved in artificial intelligence systems and applications, which have become popular in society in the last decade. For Borràs, “we cannot appreciate its impact or the risks it hides, because AI transforms the world in an unprecedented way”. The goal, among other things, is to avoid the biases that can arise with the design of algorithms, which can influence or discriminate against us, the indiscriminate use of mass video surveillance with facial recognition and the control of social behavior.
The director of APDCAT added that from a technical point of view, the available technology needs to be improved in terms of transparency and reliability, and also pointed out the need to have legal mechanisms to guarantee citizens the protection of their rights.
The most urgent, however, is to “maintain a critical view of AI”, which questions the operation of systems to find those elements that have a negative impact on people that are not obvious from a technical point of view. “Therefore, ethics must be incorporated into AI, and in the process we must be demanding, beyond proposing ethical codes”, concluded Borràs.
HUAWEI AppTouch Debuts at MWC 2022
HUAWEI AppTouch has been unveiled to global app developers at the Mobile World Congress 2022 held in Barcelona this week. The platform helps developers distribute apps and games to a global user base and significantly grow their revenue by pooling resources from global mobile carriers and automotive enterprises. AppTouch has partnered with over 60 carriers serving 40+ countries and regions across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific region. As of December 2021, AppTouch had helped developers reach more than 400 million users around the world.
Full-Stack Data Center
Huawei also held its Industrial Digital Transformation Summit during Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona 2022 in Spain. At the summit, Huawei unveiled brand-new solutions for data center and intelligent campus scenarios. Campuses have high requirements for data center storage, computing power, and energy efficiency, and face challenges in managing their vast assets. Together with industry customers, opinion leaders, and global partners, Huawei discussed industry trends, introduced latest practices in digital transformation, and shared the vision of an innovative future where digital technology, business value, and eco-friendly development come together.
During his opening speech, Li Peng, President of Huawei West European Region, emphasized that digital transformation and environmental protection are key topics in the future. Huawei provides innovative Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and a full portfolio of products to help global customers build robust ICT infrastructure and enable industrial digital transformation. In fact, over the last few decades, Huawei has been focusing on reducing energy consumption and carbon emission through continuous product and solution innovation.
Intelligent Power Transmission Line Inspection Solution
At the Mobile World Congress 2022, during the industrial digital transformation summit, Huawei again unveiled the Intelligent Power Transmission Line Inspection Solution 2.0. Through two sub-solutions – channel visualization and tower foundation safety – it addresses some of the key issues in manual line inspection and tower foundation perimeter safety. The solution is slated to help electric power enterprises detect each risk and protect each line.
Traditional manual inspection of power transmission lines faces a plethora of issues, including safety, management, efficiency, response, real-time performance, and operational risks. To address these, Huawei developed the Intelligent Power Transmission Line Inspection Solution 1.0, which integrates intelligent vision, site energy, and microwave backhaul. It ensures reliable data backhaul and visualizes the status of power transmission lines in environments where signals are missing, power supply is unavailable, and imaging is difficult. The upgraded version 2.0 adds several key functions. This includes radar-video linkage that constantly monitors the conditions around the tower foundation, securing the power grid.
The tower foundation is the skeleton that supports the stable and reliable operation of power transmission lines. However, it faces many artificial and natural threats. At the same time, manual inspection is dangerous and performed in harsh environments.
Operation of economies
The economy is about how wealth is created, distributed and consumed. It concerns the ways in which a country produces, distributes and consumes the tangible, material commodities of life. It is also about how the proceeds or income from these activities are distributed between those that contribute toward them: capitalist businesses, workers, the state and the whole of society. Every person affects the economy in some way and we are all affected by it.
Economics may appear to be the study of complicated tables and charts, statistics and numbers, but, more specifically, it is the study of what constitutes rational human behaviour in the endeavor to fulfil needs and wants. As an individual, for example, one can face the problem of having only limited resources with which to fulfil his/her wants and needs, as a result, he/she must make certain choices with his/her money.
One can probably spend part of his/her money on rent, electricity and food. Then he/she might use the rest to go to the movies and/or buy a new pair of jeans. Economists are interested in the choices he/she make, and inquire into why, for instance, he/she might choose to spend their money on a new DVD player instead of replacing his/her old TV. They would want to know whether he/she would still buy a carton of cigarettes if prices increased by 2 Birr per pack. The underlying essence of economics is trying to understand how both individuals and nations behave in response to certain material constraints.
While many excellent economists have shed light on a wide variety of subjects, many people still have only a sketchy grasp of how economies work. And what passes for economic “science” is often bunk. Fortunately, technological progress doesn’t depend on people’s economic understanding of why it occurs, although it can be stunted by bad policies.
The world economic history well recorded that fact that political economy, as it was then called, emerged in the eighteenth century, when the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith pursued “an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations”. His key insight, that competition between selfish profit-seeking producers tends to advance the common good, is profound and often true.
At the time, political economy was descriptive, analytical and firmly anchored in a political and social context. In the nineteenth century, it was rebadged as the science of economics, akin to a branch of mechanical engineering. In keeping with the science of the time, economies were thought of as gigantic, self-equilibrating machines.
Philippe Legrain, in his April 24, 2014 published book entitled “European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics are in a Mess – and How to Put Them Right” argued that, increasingly, economics ran away with itself. Instead of trying to describe the world as it is, with the economy as a form of human interaction, it imagined a mathematical ideal detached from its social, political and historical context.
Assumptions that were not approximately right but completely wrong became doctrine: that people have known, stable, independent and well-ordered preferences; that based on those preferences, they “maximize” rather than operate by rules of thumb and make do.
According to Philippe Legrain, that they know how the economy works and have “rational expectations” about what the future holds, which conforms to a known probability distribution; and that as a result, markets, not least financial ones, are “efficient” and tend towards equilibrium.
On the basis of these false assumptions, economists created a fantasy world – that’s fine, lots of people love Harry Potter – and then proceeded to give advice as if the real world was like their fantasy. And people believed them. Which is bonkers, as economist themselves called them.
Philippe Legrain noted that simplifying false assumptions allowed macroeconomists to model economies as if they consisted of an all-seeing, all-knowing single representative agent rather than as the complex interaction between many types of agent; to abstract from the financial system altogether, and to ignore the role of particular institutions. As a result, mainstream economics has very little to say about how new ideas come about and how they are deployed across the economy – which is a pity considering they are the two main drivers of growth in advanced economies.
Because it has no coherent account of innovation, mainstream economics often misses the point. Immigrants are seen as generic drones who fit into vacancies in the labor market, rather than diverse sparks of new ideas. Free trade purportedly delivers a tiny one-off gain instead of being a stimulus for competitive improvement. Entrepreneurs don’t exist.
Likewise, mainstream macroeconomics has no coherent account of how the financial sector interacts with the economy. Standard models ignore it altogether; newer ones tack it on in an ad hoc way. Milton Friedman, a famous American economist, once countered that theories should be judged by their ability to predict events rather than by the realism of their assumptions.
On that basis, according to Philippe Legrain, orthodox economics is a flop. Physics is a wonderful science that told us how to send a man to the moon. Economics pretending to be physics is a disaster that led to the crash. The notion that economies are stable and predictable and tend towards a steady state, in effect, a linear forward projection of equilibrium over time, is nonsense.
Philippe Legrain, lashed that ironically, this neo-classical theory is often advanced by free-marketeers who don’t understand its implications. If this really was an accurate description of how an economy works, a central planner could do the job just as well as the market system.
Philippe Legrain acknowledged that economies are in fact complex systems that are forever changing in often unpredictable and non-linear ways as a result of the interaction between different economic agents with a limited grasp of how the economy works and little idea of what the future holds.