Regulating Internet Content: Challenges and Opportunities

Internet has become a way of life. But, just like the market it needs some regulation to make sure it is not used by rogue elements for their benefit. The difficult question is where to draw the line.

It might be tempting to simply have a high bar and not fret about all these possibilities—terrorists are terrorists, after all. But a high bar can easily interfere with legitimate users in the name of counterterrorism. Facebook, for example, took down the iconic and disturbing image of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing after a napalm attack on the grounds that images of naked girls are, well, child pornography. (After an outcry, Facebook restored the image.) Likewise, a high bar on encryption might prevent terrorists from communicating securely with one another, but it could also prevent human rights dissidents from doing the same.

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Daniel Byman, Sarah Tate Chambers, Zann Isacson, Chris Meserole — Lawfare

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The U.K. Just Installed Its First “Seabin” to Clean Plastic-Polluted Waters

The seabin works by creating a flow of water into the bin, bringing with it any surrounding debris that is then caught in the net. According to the Seabin Project website, the device can catch 1.5 kilograms (about 3.3 pounds) of debris per day, with the ability to hold up to 12 kilograms (26.5 pounds) at full capacity. The creators estimate each seabin can remove about half a ton of debris every year, the equivalent of collecting about 20,000 bottles or 83,000 plastic bags.

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Futurism

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How do you cool 7.5 billion people on a warming planet?

Adapting will be expensive. With every degree of warming that gets locked into the climate system, the more it will cost to maintain something resembling normal life, and the more people there will be who are unable to afford it. The particular problem posed by heat isn’t that it’s impossible to adapt to, it’s that it’s difficult to adapt to equitably and in a way that doesn’t make the problem worse. Like mitigating climate change overall, any cooling solution will require collective action, in the form of international agreements like the Kigali Amendment, efficiency regulations, subsidies, technological advances, new building designs, and civic programs.

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Josh Dzieza — The Verge

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HOW BLOCKCHAIN COULD CHANGE THE WAY YOU VOTE AND PAY TAXES

Blockchain seems to be everywhere.

In an age when we can communicate, work, study, move money and even watch movies or read a book from the comfort of our own beds, iPhone in hand, it’s remarkable that our relationships with government are so un-techy. We have to fill out and sign paper forms in order to set up a business or pay taxes, we have Social Security numbers printed on a physical card that our entire lives are tied to and we even have to drive to a high school or town hall to vote in elections in person, often by marking a slip of paper with a pen. It’s all very … 20th century. Not so in the small European nation of Estonia, where you can pay taxes, buy and sell property, sign contracts, conduct business and even vote in elections online.

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James Watkins — OZY

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We may soon have our first $1 million drug. Who will pay for it? And how?

The question is no longer academic: On Thursday, Spark Therapeutics won unanimous support from a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel for its gene therapy drug, Luxturna. It seems likely to win FDA approval in the coming months. But the cost will be hefty: Analysts estimate that Luxturna, which has been shown to restore vision in children with an inherited form of blindness, could cost $1 million per patient.

Will private insurers be willing to pay? What about taxpayers, via Medicaid and Medicare? And, importantly: What happens if patients — or insurers — do foot a hefty bill, only to find out the drug simply did not work for them?

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Meghana Keshavan — STAT

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The Walkman Was a Machine for Daydreaming

Remembering the Walkman.

I can’t help missing that clunky old device. There’s something more human about technologies that have an intuitive connection between what they look like and what they do. When the tape ribbon moves, the music plays; when the ribbon is wrinkled, the music sounds garbled. This logic is the logic of our own bodies, with organs and limbs whose motions are connected to their functions, and which are susceptible to injury and gradual breakdown.

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Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow — Lenny

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How satellites, drones, and planes are making hedge funds money

Did you know satellite images are being used to count number of ships living ports in China to get a real-time estimate of economic activity? Sometimes, I feel the world is moving just too fast and I am left behind.

Three thousand miles west in Mountain View, California, lies the source of that oil data, a company called Orbital Insight, which, according to its mission statement, finds “truth and transparency” in the world’s rhythms. What that means in practice is that roughly 30 engineers and scientists spend their days sifting through satellite images for information their customers — not just hedge funds but also asset managers, insurance companies, and government agencies — want. The number of ships leaving China’s ports. The total cars parked outside every Lowe’s in the United States. The income distribution of a district in Sri Lanka. In the case of oil volumes, the key is in the shadows.

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Joy Shan — The California Sunday Magazine

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What Happens When We Give up Control of Our Cars?

Malcolm Gladwell warns us about the dangers of autonomous cars.

Words like “autonomous” and “self-driving” mislead because they promise a kind of self-sufficiency on the part of the machine. The autonomous entity is the thing that is supposed to take care of itself. But the coming class of cars does not take care of itself at all. These cars are dependent and, as such, require a larger conversation about what the rules and expectations of that dependency should look like. Once a car belongs to a network, you have to worry about whether the network is safe. Once an algorithm is in command, you have to worry about how the algorithm thinks. We are surrendering control as surely as the first car owners of a century ago did, and when you surrender control, you could end up with a chauffeur problem.

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The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI

Do you worry about AI taking over? In today’s needull, the writer explains in details why AI taking over might not be a likely scenario.

A lot of AI researchers and pundits imagine that the world is already digital, and that simply introducing new AI systems will immediately trickle down to operational changes in the field, in the supply chain, on the factory floor, in the design of products.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The impedance to reconfiguration in automation is shockingly mind-blowingly impervious to flexibility.

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Rodney Brooks

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It’s Getting Hard to Tell If a Painting Was Made by a Computer or a Human

In all aspects of life, machines are slowly taking over. But are we losing out on the essence?

Michael Connor, the artistic director of Rhizome, a non-profit that provides a platform for digital art, agrees. He describes the gap between silicon- and carbon-based artists as wide and deep: “Making art is not the sole role of being an artist. It’s also about creating a body of work, teaching, activism, using social media, building a brand.” He suggests that the picture Elgammal’s algorithm generates is art in the same way that what a Monet forger paints is art: “This kind of algorithm art is like a counterfeit. It’s a weird copy of the human culture that the machine is learning about.” He adds that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing: “Like the Roman statues, which are copies of the original Greek figures, even copies can develop an intrinsic value over time.”

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Rene Chun — Artsy

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