POLITICO AI: Decoded: COVID-1984 — Workforce monitoring — Facebook’s AI elite vs. Elon Musk

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COVID-1984: It started as a public health crisis and evolved into an economic slump. Now, the coronavirus pandemic is giving rise to unprecedented surveillance, with privacy advocates warning that invasive technology introduced to fight the virus will be here to stay.

Welcome back to AI: Decoded, I’m POLITICO’s AI correspondent in Berlin and today, we zoom in on surveillance in the age of a pandemic, from employers who use tech to monitor staff to the rise of biometric mass surveillance in privacy-savvy Europe. But before we get to that, grab some popcorn for the beef that got the AI community talking last weekend.


FACEBOOK’S AI ELITE VS. ELON MUSK: It was the clash of corporate AI titans. Over the weekend, leading AI researchers at U.S. tech giant Facebook (which has hired some of the field’s smartest minds) and Tesla CEO Elon Musk butted heads on Twitter:

The debate was triggered by a CNBC article which said that “Elon Musk likes to think he knows a thing or two about artificial intelligence, but the research community think his confidence is misplaced.” The article quoted “multiple AI researchers from different companies” who spoke anonymously due to fears of a backlash.

Enter Jérôme Pesenti, Facebook’s vice president for AI. “I believe a lot of people in the AI community would be ok saying it publicly [that Elon Musk] has no idea what he is talking about when he talks about AI,” he tweeted. “There is no such thing as AGI [artificial general intelligence] and we are nowhere near matching human intelligence.”

Which brings us to the broader story: How soon — if ever — machines will reach all-encompassing intelligence and become smarter than we are, a concept referred to as artificial general intelligence or superintelligence.

Some researchers have issued dire warnings of a future in which “superintelligent” machines take over and make us their slaves. Most prominently, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom coined the term “superintelligence” in a 2014 book. (“I couldn’t go past the tenth page,” Facebook’s Pesenti replied when asked about the theory, slamming Bostrom’s book as “mostly speculation with little grounding in reality.”)

No one, however, has brought warnings of superintelligence as much into the mainstream as Tesla CEO Musk, who has claimed, for instance, that AI technology which goes rogue would be “far more dangerous than nukes.” This has caused frustration among many longtime AI researchers who consider such warnings science fiction, stirring up unnecessary fears.

Musk’s reaction to the criticism? “Facebook sucks,” he shot back at Pesenti. That, in turn, prompted Facebook’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun to remind Musk that his Tesla engineers are working with machine-learning software primarily developed by Facebook’s AI researchers. In what seemed like an attempt to calm the tensions, LeCun added that “Teslas are great” and that he’s driving one himself.

A waste of time? Pesenti remained less conciliatory: “Why do I dislike all the technobabble on AGI/singularity?” he wrote: “Because as we waste our time arguing … we ignore the real issues that come with the broad adoption of AI: fairness, inclusion, transparency, robustness, security, privacy, user agency.”

SURVEILLANCE IN THE AGE OF A PANDEMIC: Which brings us to the issue of privacy and how Western democracies are quietly rolling out invasive surveillance technology that would have been unthinkable a couple of months ago — and Europe, arguably the world’s most privacy-savvy region, is no exception, a new report warns.

Biometric mass surveillance: “Across the EU, highly intrusive and rights-violating facial recognition and other biometric processing technologies are quietly becoming ubiquitous in our public spaces,” advocacy group European Digital Rights (EDRi), which counts 44 European civil society organizations among its members, writes in the 40-page report. The group urges Brussels to act ASAP and ban the technology, for once and all, “in both law and practice.”

Nota bene: The rise of invasive surveillance in Europe predates the pandemic. For years, governments have quietly been rolling out technology to keep watch over their populations. (AI: Decoded reported about it here or here, for example.)

COVID-1984: But now, there’s “a significant risk” that states and companies will abuse the global health crisis to further boost mass surveillance, the report’s lead author Ella Jakubowska told AI: Decoded — and first signs are showing. She quoted the example of Poland, where the government has launched an app that uses geolocation data and facial recognition technology to control those under quarantine, by randomly requesting selfies and giving users 20 minutes to upload it. “When you think about what type of society we want — the idea that if you don’t take a selfie within 20 minutes you’ll have the police come to your door, that’s a very dystopian idea,” Jakubowska said.

UK POLICE LEAVES PUBLIC IN THE DARK ABOUT USE OF INVASIVE TECH: While governments and law enforcement across Europe are rolling out — or considering — similarly invasive technology, the public is mostly left in the dark. That’s illustrated in a recent report by Britain’s Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. When the organization filed freedom of information requests with all police forces across the U.K., it found that only a tiny fraction of British police forces has consulted the public before starting to deploy AI or other technology to automate key decision-making processes.

And that’s a problem, according to the report. The lack of transparency will harm relations with communities on the ground, it warns, stressing that “racial and gender biases can be exacerbated by technologies as they are based on historic data.”


WORKFORCE SURVEILLANCE ON THE RISE: It’s not just governments ramping up surveillance. The same is true for corporations, which increasingly deploy high-tech systems to monitor the performance of their employees.

Employers are now taking it to a whole new level, going for some of the most private information about their employees: health data.

That’s according to Aida Ponce Del Castillo, a senior researcher at the European Trade Union Institute, the think tank of the European Trade Union Confederation.

“Very soon after the pandemic started, I noted that some companies were transforming their technology that was already in place in the workplace to do COVID-related surveillance — which moves us toward what I call ‘hyper-surveillance,’” she told AI: Decoded.

Welcome to the third phase of workplace surveillance: Ponce Del Castillo said that while employers have always been eager to monitor their staff, surveillance became increasingly sophisticated and invasive “under the excuse of keeping workers safe” in the years before the coronavirus hit.

Now, triggered by the global public health crisis, she is observing the emergence of what she called the “third phase of workplace surveillance” — with another layer of surveillance scanning workers’ health added on top of existing measures.

“The excuse for surveillance has moved from keeping you safe to keeping you healthy,” she said. “It’s a social pressure that can be infused to the workplace because if you’re [not sticking to the rules], a colleague can become infected.”

She cited the example of U.S. giant Amazon, which is deploying machine learning software to monitor video footage of its warehouses to make sure workers are respecting “social distancing” rules or the port of Antwerp, where workers now carry digital bracelets to trace their whereabouts.

And those examples offer only a glimpse into what’s to come. “Because of COVID-19, everything is possible,” Ponce Del Castillo added.


BRUSSELS EXTENDS DEADLINE FOR FEEDBACK ON WHITE PAPER: The European Commission has moved the deadline for feedback on its White Paper for artificial intelligence two weeks back to June 14.

White what? The “White Paper” is, in effect, the EU’s roadmap for how to become the first world region with a legal rulebook for artificial intelligence. Brussels released a first version of the nonbinding document, which spells out preferred options for AI laws, in February, asking for feedback from the industry, civil society and governments in member countries.

The White Paper includes a pitch that high-risk AI technology should undergo rigorous testing (and might even have to be retrained with other data) before it can hit the EU’s vast internal market — and particularly this idea has since been a thorn in the side of the tech industry, which is arguing that such tough requirements will hamper innovation.

REPORT WARNS OF OVER-REGULATION: Along similar lines, a new report released by the Global Digital Foundation warns that the “expansion of strict liability to the entire development and use chain of AI would present significant barriers to innovation, to the transfer to Europe of AI technologies from outside the Union and, more than anything else, to the beneficial application of AI in the EU.”

NEW CHAIR FOR THE ADA LOVELACE INSTITUTE: British computer scientist Wendy Hall was appointed the chair of the U.K.’s Ada Lovelace Institute for the next three years. The outspoken 67-year-old, who was one of the key players behind the British government’s “AI Review” published in 2017 and is also a member of the British government’s AI Council expert advisory group, will start her job on June 1.


AI race: “Which country will win the global AI race?” asks a group of journalists from Tortoise Media in an insightful long-read published on Medium, raising the question if “COVID-19 will create new winners and losers?”

AI eavesdropping: Wired has insights into “how a Chinese AI giant made chatting — and surveillance — easy.”

AI obituary: Excitement about AI and what it’s capable of doing has ebbed, argues the Financial Times.
