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China’s Social Credit System (ABC, 2018)

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China’s Social Credit System (ABC, 2018)

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Chinese authorities claim they have banned more than 7 million people deemed "untrustworthy" from boarding flights, and nearly 3 million others from riding on high-speed trains, according to a report by the country's National Development and Reform Commission.

The announcements offer a glimpse into Beijing's ambitious attempt to create a Social Credit System (SCS) by 2020 - that is, a proposed national system designed to value and engineer better individual behaviour by establishing the scores of 1.4 billion citizens and "awarding the trustworthy" and "punishing the disobedient".

Liu Hu, a 43-year-old journalist who lives in China's Chongqing municipality, told the ABC he was "dumbstruck" to find himself caught up in the system and banned by airlines when he tried to book a flight last year.

Mr Liu is on a "dishonest personnel" list - a pilot scheme of the SCS - because he lost a defamation lawsuit in 2015 and was asked by the court to pay a fine that is still outstanding according to the court record.

"No one ever notified me," Mr Liu, who claims he paid the fine, said.

"It's baffling how they just put me on the blacklist and kept me in the dark."

Like the other 7 million citizens deemed to be "dishonest" and mired in the blacklist, Mr Liu has also been banned from staying in a star-rated hotel, buying a house, taking a holiday, and even sending his nine-year-old daughter to a private school.

And just last Monday, Chinese authorities announced they would also seek to freeze the assets of those deemed "dishonest people".

Bonus points for donating blood and volunteer work

As the national system is still being fully realised, dozens of pilot social credit systems have already been tested by local governments at provincial and city levels.

For example, Suzhou, a city in eastern China, uses a point system where every resident is rated on a scale between 0 and 200 points - every resident starts from the baseline of 100 points.

One can earn bonus points for benevolent acts and lose points for disobeying laws, regulations, and social norms.

According to a 2016 report by local police, the top-rated Suzhou citizen had 134 points for donating more than one litre of blood and doing more than 500 hours of volunteer work.

The city said the next step was to use the credit system to punish people for transgressions such as dodging transport fares, cheating in video games, and restaurant no-shows.

In Shenzhen, authorities recently launched the use of facial recognition and online shaming to crackdown on small crimes such as jaywalking.

In Xiamen, where the development of a local social credit system started as early as 2004, authorities reportedly automatically apply messages to the mobile phone lines of blacklisted citizens.

"The person you're calling is dishonest," whoever calls a lowly-rated person will be told before the call is put through.

Citizens profiled by their consumption behaviour

Private companies in China have also run pilot programs using complex analytical systems to profile their customers, further advancing various technologies - such as facial recognition and online shaming - that could be used with official 2020 rollouts.

For example, Sesame Credit is a private credit system developed by the Alibaba-affiliated company Ant Financial.

The system uses algorithms and data from Alipay, Alibaba's massively popular payment platform, to rate people by their consumption behaviour and preference among other factors.

"Someone who plays video games for 10 hours a day, for example, would be considered an idle person," Li Yingyun, Sesame Credit's technology director, told Chinese media.

"Someone who frequently buys diapers would be considered as probably a parent, who on balance is more likely to have a sense of responsibility."

However, according to its website, Sesame Credit maintains that despite using the data to openly profile customers it currently does not share the information with Chinese authorities.

'Wifi sniffers', night vision and big data

Meanwhile, recent reports have revealed that in some areas China employs what is known as the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) - a high-tech mass surveillance system that pools information on citizens' bank records, computer details, and legal past.

It reportedly runs in parallel to the social credit system and gathers its information from multiple sources or "sensors".

One source is CCTV cameras, some of which have facial recognition and infrared capabilities giving them "night vision" and are positioned in locations police consider sensitive.

Another source is "wifi sniffers", which pool the unique identifying addresses of computers, smartphones and other networked devices.

The IJOP also reportedly gathers information including licence plate numbers and citizen identification card numbers from security check points.

"They basically just do monitoring and surveillance of people and particularly categories of people who the authorities consider as focused personnel," Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, told the ABC.

"That could be people with mental disabilities or with mental health problems, or people who complained, petitioners, and Uyghurs [minorities] and so on as a national project."

"The IJOP sends a list of people deemed suspicious to the police and they are then detained - the social credit system can result in a small punishment and warrants that discipline people in a number of different ways."

Could China combine these projects to engineer society?

Surveillance software identifies details about people and vehicles in Beijing.(Photo: Reuters/Thomas Peter)(Yvonne Yong)

If the Chinese Government manages to amalgamate the regional pilot projects and the immense amounts of data by 2020, it will be able to exert absolute social and political control and "pre-emptively shape how people behave," Samantha Hoffman, an independent consultant on Chinese state security, said.

"If you are aware that your behaviour will negatively or positively impact your score, and thus your life and the lives of those you associate with, then you will likely adjust your decision-making accordingly," Ms Hoffman said.

But the question remains if the Chinese authorities could really "pull it off", Ms Wang said.

"The Ministry of Public Security runs a number of databases, and then regional authorities also run their databases," Ms Wang said.

"It is difficult to know how these databases are related together and how they're structured and how they are updated.

"At the moment, I would say that they [are] updated to some extent but they're not very well integrated, and the integration is going to be difficult."

Hu Naihong, a finance professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, who is helping to build the national social credit system, seems to agree.

"The top-level design, the institutional framework, and the key documents are all in place, but there are still many problems to be solved," the professor said in a 2017 meeting in Zhejiang.

"The most serious problem being that all kinds of platforms are rigorously collecting [data], while having vague legal and conceptual basis and boundaries."

There have been many cases where the current algorithms wrongly trapped innocent people in the blacklist.

In 2015, Zhong Pei, a then 16-year-old student living in Jiangsu, was blacklisted for being dishonest, after her father killed two people and died in a car accident.

It took Ms Zhong four months to dispute the court's decision and get her name off the list in 2017 to board a train and enrol in her university.

Li Jinglin, a lawyer at Xinqiao law firm in Beijing, said the current pilot schemes of the social credit system had mainly been targeting two groups of people: those who fail to follow court orders or pay debts, and those who pose threats to the Communist Party's rule or general "social stability" - dissidents and petitioners, as well as their families.

An abuse of state power, and breach of laws

Aforementioned blacklisted journalist Mr Liu, whose case has attracted international media attention, appears to fall into both categories. He previously exposed corrupt Chinese officials and was held by police for "spreading rumours".

While it is expected that governments make reasonable attempts to enforce court orders, experts say it is against local Chinese laws and is an abuse of fundamental human rights to restrict citizens' movements and deny them equal access to education.

"Banning citizens from traveling by flight or high-speed rail for having low credit records is a violation of civil rights," Mr Li told the ABC.

"Especially that the railway and aviation are state-owned industries, and are obligated to grant every citizen equal access to transportation."

Many observers fear human rights could be increasingly violated via the social credit system, and - combined with a growing surveillance system and technologies such as facial recognition being rolled out across the country - the Chinese Government could have the ability to turn the system on its citizens.

"China is characterised by a system of 'rule by law', rather than true rule of law," Elsa B Kania, an expert in Chinese defence innovation and emerging technologies at the Centre for a New American Security, said.

"That law [and extra-legal measures] can be used as a weapon to legitimise the targeting of those whom the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] perceives as a threat.

"In such an environment, such a system could be abused to those same ends."

The question that remains to be answered in coming years, experts say, is where the line between "bettering society" and "controlling society" will be drawn.

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'Punishing the disobedient': China's Social Credit System could engineer social behaviour by 2020

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Chinese authorities claim they have banned more than 7 million people deemed "untrustworthy" from boarding flights, and nearly 3 million others from riding on high-speed trains, according to a report by the country's National Development and Reform Commission.

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Human test subjects – Nazi Medical Experiments 

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Human test subjects – Nazi Medical Experiments 

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Clinical Trials for Vaccine Development 

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Clinical Trials for Vaccine Development 

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Satellite Technologies in Emergency Response 

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Satellite Technologies in Emergency Response 

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Technological Repression of Xinjiang Muslims 

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Technological Repression of Xinjiang Muslims 

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Biometric Registration of Rohingya Refugees 

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Biometric Registration of Rohingya Refugees 

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Biometric Registration of Roghingya Refugees

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Biometric Registration of Roghingya Refugees

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https://odi.org/en/insights/although-shocking-the-rohingya-biometrics-scandal-is-not-surprising-and-could-have-been-prevented/

Summary
Rohingya perceives that the data collected will be used for identifying specific aids for each refugee but instead the data is being circulated without consent to Myanmar government. The main focus is that refugees don’t know what their data is being used for

Controversies/Ethical perspectives/tensions
1. No consent was given to circulate data
2. There was no chance to have a choice to not give their data because in their minds they think that they won’t receive aid if they don’t give their data

1. From perspective of Govt: it’s ethical because it’s abt deontology [verify ppl for repatriation + easier for refugees themselves to migrate and move around the country]
2. From perspective of human rights groups: not ethical because data can be exploited and can be used fuel discrimination esp in countries where corruption still exists

Possible solutions
1. transparency from government
2. Consent given to refugees

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The potential harm of sharing information with a regime that has a long history of manipulating registration systems to exclude and marginalise Rohingya populations is obvious. That biometrics are involved makes it worse. Unlike names or other personal information, biometrics are sticky - it's not something you can change or escape.

HRW's report has rightly triggered outcry, although UNHCR insists it followed proper procedures. Yet these issues are far from unique to the Rohingya crisis. As biometric registration of refugees has been rolled out in more and more places over the past decade, questionable practices around informed consent, data sharing and accountability have been a troublingly consistent feature.

Just how informed is consent?

A basic principle of any kind of data collection, informed consent means that people should be able to make a meaningful choice about whether or not to share their data. To do this, they need to understand how the information will be used and be confident that they won't face negative consequences if they decline. This formula is complicated by extreme power imbalances - like those characterising the relationship between service providers and refugees. Here, gaining consent may need to involve extensive trust-building to be meaningful - it's harder to say 'no' to something when the person asking for your data also has a say over whether you eat tomorrow.

In Bangladesh, refugees either didn't understand how their data will be used, or felt they didn't have a choice. Syrian refugees in Jordan - where biometric registration started in 2012 - reported similar experiences in recent interviews with HPG. Again, there was a startling lack of information available: as one Syrian explained, 'They didn't tell us what it was for, and we didn't ask'. None of the people we spoke to knew of anyone who had refused to offer their biometrics because, as another put it, 'I will give my information if it means assistance'.

Sloppy or outright coercive practices around informed consent have been documented elsewhere: in four out of five countries reviewed in a 2016 UNHCR internal audit, inadequate information was provided to refugees. In Ethiopia, refugees who didn't provide their data were cut out of aid distributions, leading some to return to their country of origin.

Concerns around sharing biometrics are deeply linked with how that data might be used

The nature of registration as a joint exercise between UNHCR and host governments means that data frequently feeds into wider identification and surveillance systems. In Kenya, the biometric system was purposefully designed to crossmatch between national and humanitarian databases. According to HPG's forthcoming research, UNHCR's data is 100% accessible to the Government of Jordan, which crosschecks it with their counter-terrorism data.

For many refugees, having their personal information fall into the hands of repressive regimes back home is a worst-case scenario. Yet the fact that this possibility is often a feature of registration processes - and the risks that this may involve - is rarely discussed with those affected.

Why does this all keep happening?

Partially, it's a question of who biometrics are really for. Despite assertions that biometric IDs can make receiving aid more efficient and more dignified, not only does this not necessarily hold true (as HPG's research in Jordan suggests) this is rarely the main driver for roll out. Instead, fraud reduction, efficiency savings, security requirements, or simply path dependence - 'this is how we do things now' - play a much more prominent role. These considerations are much more squarely aligned with the interests of aid agencies, donors, host governments, and technology providers, than with refugees.

This top-down imposition of biometrics as something done to crisis-affected people rather than for them is exacerbated by the wider challenge of accountability within the humanitarian system.

With little meaningful power or representation, refugees have time and again been shut out of decisions as to how biometrics should be rolled out, what data gets shared with whom, what the risks are, and how they should best be mitigated, During registration processes, even the basic step of explaining what is going on does not appear to be a priority, let alone a wider consultative process.

Re-centring refugees in the process

It's likely that biometrics are here to stay for the foreseeable future. This makes it all the more important to make changes now, so that the same problems don't become more deeply 'locked in' to how things are done.

Organisations involved in biometric registration need to make sure their commitments to data responsibility make the jump from policy documents to practice. This means re-centring process around the needs of refugees.

Refugees should be involved in deciding whether biometrics are appropriate at all - as is the case with cash transfer programming - rather than being provided with individual opt-outs once the process has already started. This may not always be possible as, increasingly, the use of biometrics in refugee registration is becoming a requirement of host governments. In such cases, approaches need to move away from 'sensitisation' and towards co-design, so that refugees have a meaningful say in ensuring systems respond to their own priorities.

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Although shocking, the Rohingya biometrics scandal is not surprising and could have been prevented

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The potential harm of sharing information with a regime that has a long history of manipulating registration systems to exclude and marginalise Rohingya populations is obvious. That biometrics are involved makes it worse. Unlike names or other personal information, biometrics are sticky - it's not something you can change or escape.

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4487829/#:~:text=The%20Unit%20731%20experiments%20involved,the%20skin%20with%20infectious%20particles.

The Japanese Unit 731 justified their actions via two ideologies- Expanding the Southeast-Asian Sphere of Influence and the viewing the Korean and the Chinese as racially inferior.
Some of the inferior and gruesome actions conducted are attempting to start plagues in local villages and injecting patients with unknown virions. Through this, they could investigate and discover more about biochemical warfare, while exterminating the racially inferior. There were no known survivors as most died from exposure from the failed experiments or were executed to conceal evidence about the cruel trials and experiments.Hence, The Nuremberg Code was invented after WW2 to protect the sanctity of life even when war is occurring.

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Introduction

In 1945-46, U.S. officials made similar discoveries in both Germany and Japan, unearthing evidence of unethical experiments on human beings that constituted war crimes. The outcomes in the two defeated nations, however, were strikingly different. In Germany, the U.S. played a key role in bringing Nazi physicians to trial and publicizing their misdeeds. In Japan, the U.S. played an equally key role in concealing biological warfare experiments and securing immunity for the perpetrators. How we are to understand these very different responses?

Sheldon Harris, in his authoritative history of the Japanese biological warfare program, argues that during November 1945-March 1948:

The questions of ethics and morality as they affected scientists in Japan and in the United States never once entered into a single discussion... In all the considerable documentation that has survived..., not one individual is chronicled as having said [biological warfare] human experiments were an abomination and that their perpetrators should be prosecuted. The only concern voiced was that of the possibility of exposure that would cause the United States some embarrassment should word of the bargain ever become public knowledge.

In alleging that "questions of ethics and morality" were never raised, Harris seems to mean that no questions were answered in ways he agreed with. Much as we sympathize with his moral outrage, his statement is uninformative about the actual reasoning that the U.S. scientists employed as justification.

It is informative to compare the American response in Japan with the work of one important figure in Germany, Canadian Air Force officer John W. Thompson. Thompson recognized the German experiments as war crimes that set a dangerous precedent for the scientific community, and was uniquely influential in persuading Allied authorities to act.

We first briefly summarize the experiments in the two countries, then describe Thompson's activities in postwar Germany. We next recount the U.S. investigations of Japanese biological warfare experiments. We conclude by comparing the two Allied responses to medical war crimes and propose reasons for the difference.

German and Japanese Experiments

The scope and nature of these unethical experiments is well described elsewhere. A database created by Paul Weindling's group at Oxford Brookes University has identified approximately 25,000 victims of German experiments, with confirming documentation for around 10,000. Only about five percent of experiments ended with the death of the subjects but many others caused severe mutilation.

While Japanese biological warfare experiments were conducted at several locations, the best known is Unit 731, located near Harbin in Japanese-occupied Manchuria and commanded by Shiro Ishii. Established in 1936, Unit 731 eventually comprised 3000 personnel, 150 buildings, and capacity for holding 600 prisoners at a time for experimental use. Thousands of human beings were experimented on and killed at Unit 731 alone. Additional thousands were killed in other branches of Japan's extensive biological and chemical warfare program. It is unlikely that accurate totals will ever become available.

The Unit 731 experiments involved infecting prisoners, primarily Chinese prisoners of war and civilians, deliberately with infectious agents, and exposing prisoners to bombs designed to penetrate the skin with infectious particles. There were no known survivors of these experiments; those who did not die from infection were killed to be studied at autopsy, and in the waning days of the war all remaining prisoners were killed to conceal evidence. Some experiments were also done to test human responses to freezing temperatures and other extreme conditions.

Japanese military units also carried out field testing of disease-spreading weapons against both enemy troops and civilian populations. Additional thousands of deaths were caused by spreading plague-infected fleas and cholera bacilli in China in this manner, even though the experimenters developed no really efficient and well-controlled method for dispersing such agents.

The Nazis justified their experiments on three grounds-racist, eugenics/public health, and wartime national interests. The victims (primarily Jews, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war) were believed to be racially inferior to the German-Aryan stock. Nazi party propaganda, especially effective among physicians, described the threat posed to the German people ( volk) by racial contamination and unbridled reproduction among those with "unfit" genes. With the start of war in 1939, the attitude had been created that it seemed indefensible that the flower of German youth were facing death on the battlefield unless these racially inferior beings were also sacrificed for the war effort.

Two of these justifications motivated the Japanese. They viewed the Chinese and Koreans as racially inferior. They also appealed frequently to patriotism. They were not, however, concerned about threats to Japanese racial purity; rather they simply wished to eliminate inferior populations and occupy their territories for Japanese imperialist expansion. The Japanese also argued that the prisoners used as experimental subjects, as suspected resisters and communists, would have been executed in any event.

The Role of John W. Thompson

A person whose important role in post-war events has not been sufficiently recognized is John W. Thompson. Born in Mexico of American parents, educated in the U.S., and a medical graduate of Edinburgh, John West Thompson (1906-1965) entered World War II as an officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). Thompson possessed varied expertise. He was a skilled enough psychiatrist to assess German war crimes defendants for underlying psychopathology. He was prominent enough in medical research later to be offered (and decline) the physiology chair at the University of Ottawa in 1946. He had studied high-altitude flying, fitting him to evaluate German wartime research in that area. Finally, he had worked at Harvard during the 1930s with physiologists Andrew Ivy and Leo Alexander, who became central figures in the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial.

When he arrived in Germany in May, 1945, Thompson's first experience involved the care of the survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Even after liberation, deaths mounted alarmingly from malnutrition, a typhus epidemic, and inadequate medical response.

Thompson was then assigned the task of assessing the results of German aeronautical-stress research. He quickly discerned that much of this research was conducted in an unethical manner, as was confirmed by interviews with both German scientists and surviving subjects. Eventually Thompson was named Secretary-General of the International Scientific Commission (War Crimes). However, Thompson's influence was exercised largely through personal contacts and diplomacy. Weindling believes that his behind-the-scenes role was important enough to merit the title "godfather of both the Nuremberg Code and informed consent."

In November 1946, Thompson outlined his plans for the International Scientific Commission in a report to Lester Pearson, then Canada's Under Secretary of State for External Affairs:

...[T]o gather all evidence of German experimental work carried out in an unethical manner on human beings, and as representative scientific bodies, to

1. pass judgment on the value of the scientific results obtained

2. condemn, in the name of science, the prosecution of such experiments, and finally,

3. lay down some definition of what may be termed a justifiable experiment where a human being is used as a subject.

These priorities reflect several ethical judgments. First, while the medical superintendent of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, T.B. Layton, had argued that all Nazi medical research data should be destroyed,, Thompson thought that science demanded that any valuable results be preserved. At the same time he viewed the means of obtaining those data as unethical and criminal. Indeed, Thompson appears responsible for introducing the idea of a "medical war crime" into the official thinking of the Allied occupation in November 1945. Finally, when many thought the Nazis uniquely depraved, Thompson worried that scientists in other nations were equally capable of conducting unethical human experiments unless clear ethical boundaries were erected.

Thompson's scientific intelligence team preserved and microfilmed a treasure trove of captured German research records-files later used by the Nuremberg prosecutors at the Doctors' Trial. They also interviewed many Nazi scientists, but never discussed trading immunity from prosecution for access to scientific information. Among the many examples of the influence Thompson exerted over the U.S.-led responses through his personal diplomacy was helping to assure that the scientific intelligence work was closely coordinated with war crimes investigation units.

Japan: Scientific Investigations

The Japanese scientists were more astute than the Germans, both in banding together to plan their response to the American investigations and in realizing that the American interest in their data gave them a powerful bargaining chip. Like Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights tales, the Japanese interrogees became adept at revealing just enough in each interview, leaving what was yet unsaid as a tantalizing demonstration of how valuable their continued freedom would be to U.S. interests.

Lt. Col. Murray Sanders, a bacteriologist was the first investigator from the U.S. biological warfare unit at Camp Detrick, Maryland to travel to Japan. Sanders was told by several interviewees in September and October 1945 that the Japanese military had engaged solely in defensive research, as biological warfare was "clearly against humanity." The repetition of this phrase suggested a prearranged script. Sanders trusted his translator, Lt. Col. Ryoichi Naito, not realizing that Naito had served in Unit 731 and was deliberately manipulating the interrogations. In a 1983 interview, Sanders admitted that he had been "deceived" during his nine-week investigation

The second American investigator, Lt. Col. Arvo T. Thompson, was similarly unable to extract correct information, but left in May 1946 increasingly convinced that the truth was being withheld. Gen. Ishii told Thompson that biological warfare was "inhumane" and would (if the Japanese had conducted such research) "defile the virtue and benevolence of the Emperor." This was a clear statement from a Japanese source, however cynically provided, that biological warfare experiments were unethical.

The third American scientist-investigator, Dr. Norbert H. Fell, a civilian employee of Camp Detrick, arrived in 1947. Fell was more knowledgeable than his two predecessors, whose reports had primed him to look out for deception. After testing Fell, Ishii's group apparently decided to reveal that human experiments had, in fact, been conducted for biological weapons development. Their selected go-between was a "prominent businessman," Kanichiro Kamei, whom Fell interviewed on April 21-22, 1947. Kamei was a PhD from Columbia University who had earlier served as a translator during the investigation conducted by Murray Sanders, said that despite his efforts to "persuade the Japanese to reveal everything," "the interrogations...were too soon after the surrender. However, if the men who actually know the detailed results of the experiments can be convinced that your investigation is from a purely scientific standpoint, I believe that you can get more information. ... I believe it will reassure any personnel...that you are not investigating 'war crimes.'" Referring to a Japanese officer being interrogated, Kamei told Fell, "MASUDA admitted to me that experiments were carried out on humans.... The personnel involved in carrying out these human experiments took a vow never to disclose information. However, I feel sure that if you handle the investigation from a scientific point of view, you can obtain detailed information."

Two days later, Kamei stated that the Japanese feared that information given to the US "will be discovered by Communists and passed to Russia." Those behind Kamei now saw that an emerging U.S. priority was keeping biological warfare information out of Communist hands. Kamei told Fell, "The human experiments were extensive enough to reach scientific conclusions. ...conclusions [that] are in no way based on imagination." Having previously lied that all documents had been destroyed and that the surviving officers of Unit 731 had only hazy recollections of experiments, the Japanese now changed course and reassured the Americans that they had valuable information to trade for immunity from prosecution.

Fell, therefore, became the first American scientist made directly aware of activities that clearly constituted war crimes (assuming that the human experiments had been carried out without any semblance of voluntary consent). His response was to adopt Kamei's proposal, that almost certainly originated with Ishii. Fell proceeded to inform each interrogated subject, "Investigation was to obtain scientific and technical data and was not concerned with 'war crimes.'" Harris is unsure who authorized Fell to offer such assurances; Fell lacked the military authority to make such a move on his own.

However, in an addendum to his final report, dated June 24, 1947, Fell noted that the "information that has been received so far is proving of great interest here and it certainly will have a great deal of value." He then added:

At a conference yesterday at which the Chief of the Chemical Corps and representatives of the War, State and Justice Departments were present, it was informally agreed that the recommendations of the C.inC., FEC [Commander-in-Chief, Far East Command, i.e. General Douglas MacArthur], and the Chief, Chemical Corps would be accepted, i.e. that all information obtained in this investigation would be held in intelligence channels and not used for 'War Crimes' programs.

Harris argues that the Joint Chiefs of Staff would have had to approve a decision of this gravity, and they in turn would have proceeded only with cabinet-level if not Presidential approval. This decision kept all information about the human biological warfare experiments within intelligence channels, labeled top secret, whereas war crimes prosecution would entail public disclosure. The Fell report shows that these options were weighed and that scientific and military value took priority over ethical and criminal accountability.

The final report by U.S. scientists from Camp Detrick was submitted in December 1947, by technical director Dr. Edwin V. Hill and staff pathologist Dr. Joseph Victor. Ishii's group now gave the Americans detailed reports on the experimental program, including a listing of 8000 pathological slides and hundreds of color drawings.

From an ethical standpoint, the Hill-Victor report is most notable for statements that have since been widely quoted. Hill and Victor summarized the Japanese data, "Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation....It is hoped that the individuals who voluntarily contributed this information will be spared embarrassment because of it and that every effort will be taken to prevent this information from falling into other hands." The ethical reasoning implicit in this passage seemed to be:

1. U.S. scientists have "scruples" regarding experimentation on humans. The Japanese scientists had no such scruples, indicating that their activities were unethical if not criminal.

2. Having conducted unethical and criminal experiments, the Japanese scientists are therefore in a position to be embarrassed by their revelation.

3. Saving the Japanese scientists (who belatedly cooperated with the U.S. inquiry) from embarrassment is a higher ethical priority than securing accountability for war crimes.

4. The overriding goals are first, to secure these unique (because unscrupulous) data for the U.S., and second, to prevent them from "falling into other [i.e., Communist] hands."

Hill and Victor added a further argument based on cost-effectiveness. They calculated that the U.S. had so far spent approximately 250,000 yen in its investigations of the Japanese biological warfare program. By contrast, Ishii's research had cost "many millions of dollars and years of work" (with no mention of the human costs in lives and misery). In short, the U.S. had paid proportionally a "mere pittance" compared to the cost of generating these data. This became a further argument for taking the data and assuring that the Japanese who provided it were not subjected to "embarrassment."

Although conjecture, it is tempting to read into these statements a further conclusion that the Americans, contrasting their slow progress at Camp Detrick with the apparently vast accomplishments of Unit 731, were appreciative of what the Japanese lack of "scruples" had achieved.

Military Legal Investigations

The Japanese scientists were worried about war crimes prosecutions then being pursued by the Adjutant General's Office. The difference between the scientific and legal investigations formed a striking contrast between Germany and Japan. In Germany, the very idea of "medical war crimes" originated among the scientists investigating the experiments, who then lobbied the legal staff to pursue prosecutions. In Japan, the legal staff was independently seeking evidence to prosecute war crimes, and the scientists were instrumental in stopping them.

The legal section received both anonymous and signed accusations against Ishii. In November, 1946, investigators wrote, "This information is being included in this report as another indication of mounting complaints concerning the alleged activities of General ISHII and his associates...principal among which are alleged to have been infecting Prisoners of War with glanders for experimental purposes."

However, further investigation and prosecution was stymied by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as early as March 1947. They ordered the Adjutant General's Office to seek the approval of military intelligence (G-2) for any further activities and to treat all related documents as top secret. It took another year for the final decision to be reached at the highest levels. The complicating factor was repeated requests from the Soviets, officially U.S. allies against Japan, to be allowed to interrogate the Japanese scientists. U.S. authorities were torn between the desire to deny the Russians access, even at the cost of an international incident, and their suspicion that allowing the Soviets to interrogate the Japanese with Americans present could reveal useful tips about the Soviets' current knowledge of bacteriological warfare.

A task force of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), a high-level group overseeing the military occupation, indirectly admitted on August 1, 1947 their shaky ethical position. They acknowledged that Unit 731 "violate[d] the rules of land warfare," and that the Japanese experiments were similar to those for which Germans had been tried for war crimes.

The task force now needed justification for refusing to prosecute. First they concluded that the evidence available was insufficient to document legal guilt. This was fallacious, both because it misrepresented the evidence then documented in Adjutant General reports, and also ignored the fact that confirmatory evidence was not being pursued specifically in response to military orders. Finally, the task force appealed to the same reasoning in the scientific reports: "The value to the U.S. of Japanese [biological warfare] data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from 'war crimes' prosecution." This conclusion amounted to a major coup for Ishii. When the full assessment of the Japanese data was finally completed, the Camp Detrick staff learned virtually nothing beyond what the Americans had already discovered by more "scrupulous" means.

The SWNCC did not act on the task force's recommendations for another six months. The Joint Chiefs' final order placing all information under G-2 purview and ceasing all prosecutions against Ishii and associates was sent on March 13, 1948. By that time the Toyko war crimes trials against high Japanese military officials had been concluded, so the SWNCC review constituted a delaying tactic.

Aftermath

The aftermath to the cover-up of Japanese medical war crimes has been extensively documented elsewhere. Unlike the U.S., the Soviet Union tried twelve captured Japanese military personnel from Unit 731 in Khabarovsk for war crimes and later published the proceedings. U.S. authorities dismissed the proceedings as communist propaganda, though in hindsight the information presented was reasonably accurate. The relatively light sentences given to the perpetrators, compared to the seriousness of the charges against them, suggested that the Soviets, like the Americans, traded leniency for access to data.

Discussion: Wartime Exigency

The Allies' ethical decisions differed sharply in Germany and in Japan. The divergence can be explained partly by Japanese ruthlessness. Thompson was probably influenced by his direct contact with survivors of the concentration camps. The Japanese assured that no Allied personnel could encounter survivors of Unit 731, because they left no survivors. The women of Ravensbrück, who displayed their experimental wound scars, were among the most effective prosecution witnesses at Nuremberg; the Japanese eliminated all potential witnesses.

Contrary to Harris's claim that no ethical thinking appears in the American documents on Japan, there was no lack of ethical perception. The Americans clearly saw a problem requiring ethical justification. Although today we regard their ethical thinking as seriously flawed; nevertheless, it was a form of ethical reasoning.

Previous analyses of the Nazi and Japanese transgressions and the U.S. cover-up have stressed national security concerns and nationalist ideology. We suggest expanding this list to include wartime exigency.

National security, by itself, explains why basic human rights might be overridden by measures presumed necessary for national survival. This explanation, however, cannot fully account for the reasoning we encounter in post-war occupied Japan. Wartime exigency better captures the sense of urgency and the impatience with a full discussion of ethical options or with a fastidious inquiry into abuses of rights. National security may ultimately set the actors' priorities, but cannot by itself explain the way decisions are made or not made. By contrast, "Don't you realize that there's a war going on?" better accounts for the reasoning recorded in the American documents. As Edmund Pellegrino summarized the rationalizations of the Nazi physicians, "To resist would have been treasonous; ethics must be subordinate to the demands of war."

In its moral implications, wartime exigency might be seen as a darker version of carnival (when "carnival" is viewed as a general cultural phenomenon rather than as any specific, local celebration). All year, people chafe under social constraints, which especially affect the underclasses. Once a year, people are able to break these constraints by overturning the usual social conventions, wearing masks to escape personal responsibility. Since even the underclasses have a stake in maintaining the social order, all are reassured that this overturning of convention is only temporary, and in a few days things will return to normal.

In peacetime, people who have strong cruel, sadistic impulses chafe at the moral constraints that forbid them from acting upon these impulses. People who have such impulses are often poorly equipped to engage in careful moral reasoning, so they may also be frustrated when, better fitted for casuistical reasoning, appear to get away with shady moral behavior. Wartime loosens unwelcome constraint for such individuals. They act out their impulses, citing the highest of motives -- patriotism. They feel free to thwart anyone who questions their morality, since "Don't you know there's a war going on?" cuts off all moral debate at the outset. Finally, should any guilt feelings arise, they can comfort themselves with the illusion that all this is only temporary--soon the war will be won, peace will ensue, and the normal moral order can be restored.

In another example of wartime exigency trumping human rights, David Rothman describes the Committee on Medical Research (CMR) that oversaw war-related science in the U.S. during 1941-45. The CMR accepted that research on human subjects required informed, voluntary consent. However, they applied that understanding inconsistently. They approved, for example, a study of an anti-malarial drug in 500 Illinois prisoners who were deliberately infected with the disease; one prisoner died. They proudly reported these experiments in press releases that lauded the inmates' willingness to volunteer, stating, "these one-time enemies to society appreciate to the fullest extent just how completely this is everybody's war." Any concerns about the prisoners' ability to consent voluntarily to risky experiments were eclipsed by war-effort fervor.

Wartime exigency does more than simply prioritize national security over human rights. It urges toughness and decisiveness in decision-making, so that a moral blindness that would be seen as a deficiency in other times is instead seen as a virtue and a necessity.

Wartime exigency is worth labeling as a specific factor alongside national security particularly because of how our contemporary culture is seemingly engaged in a perpetual state of war. The war against the Axis powers was immediately supplanted by the Cold War, and the exigencies of that war were viewed as justifying the egregious actions taken in Japan. American society saw the end of the Cold War in 1989, but then declared an interminable War on Terror in 2001, and that most recent war has been implicated in a number of indefensible ethical and policy choices.

Conclusions

Thompson in Germany decided that the war was over, that the Germans had done terrible things under the pressure of racism, national security, and wartime exigency, and that future scientists in other nations would be tempted to commit similar crimes unless people decisively spoke out. The American scientists and policymakers in Japan decided that a new war was being waged and that national security and wartime exigency justified exonerating the perpetrators of Unit 731 and covering up their crimes.

By proposing wartime exigency as one ethical reason for the American cover-up, we do not mean to suggest that this reason operated without certain political and socio-cultural contexts, particularly the Cold War environment. Another socio-historical element that has not been discussed, to our knowledge, is the role of racism. It might appear that racism played only a relatively minor part in American calculations. However, there was an obvious double standard in the American postwar responses to the experiments upon different nationalities. A U.S. tribunal in Yokohama in 1948 indicted nine Japanese physician-professors and medical students for conducting vivisection upon captured American fliers. Two professors were sentenced to death and others to 15-20 years' imprisonment, much harsher than the sentences of the Russian Khabarovsk trial. The war between Japan and the United States was not only a war of empires and powers, but also a war of races. The military and political end of the Pacific war did not immediately end the racist socio-historical context.

One might object that our condemnation of events in Japan lacks ethical substance, since it might simply count as an argument of the form, "People did something years ago; today we would condemn what they did; therefore we must be right and they must be wrong." We believe that we have defended against this objection by comparing two reactions to wartime experiments that were instituted by the same nation at roughly the same time. We have argued that the U.S. position in Japan would stand condemned as unethical if one merely applied the same standards that were then being applied in Germany.

Another objection might compare the tack taken by Americans in Japan with common law-enforcement practices, granting selective immunity to certain criminals as part of a wider effort to fight crime. There are several reasons why this analogy fails. First, if anyone were to adopt a strategy of granting immunity to gather confessions which would then lead to the prosecution of guiltier parties, it would have been the military legal authorities. But we have seen that it was the legal authorities who were seeking war crimes prosecution, while the scientific authorities were all for granting immunity. Second, and more telling, there was no effort to use any of these confessions as tools to prosecute other guilty parties. The overall goal of the U.S. effort in Japan was effectively to grant immunity to the entire Japanese medical profession, and to assure that no prosecution for "medical war crimes" ever took place. Far from being an acceptable strategy in a difficult situation, the U.S. cover-up met both ethical and legal criteria for "complicity after fact."

According to the arguments we have put forth, it is essential to condemn both the Japanese war criminals and the Americans who covered up their crimes. But mere condemnation risks treating the Japanese perpetrators and the American officials as the radical "others" of humanity, our moral inferiors. To pursue a deeper understanding is not to rationalize or justify the atrocities but to identify the historical and ethical causes of why things went so terribly wrong. However faulty the ethical reasoning employed in the cover-up, by studying it we gain important insights into where such flawed reasoning may next be applied today and tomorrow.

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United States Responses to Japanese Wartime Inhuman Experimentation after World War II: National Security and Wartime Exigency

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In 1945-46, U.S. officials made similar discoveries in both Germany and Japan, unearthing evidence of unethical experiments on human beings that constituted war crimes. The outcomes in the two defeated nations, however, were strikingly different. In Germany, the U.S. played a key role in bringing Nazi physicians to trial and publicizing their misdeeds.

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vac train - fast transportation to other countries ; so many circumstances that could limit the success of this project

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Transatlantic passengers on Concorde often referred to the supersonic plane as their "time machine" for its ability to land in New York two hours before it left London.

But that kind of illusion could look like child's play if so-called vacuum trains ever take off.

These futuristic transporters, designed to hurtle through tunnels that have had all of the air sucked out of them, could theoretically hit speeds of up to 4,000 km/h (2,500 mph), cutting the commute from Europe to North America to just one hour. In this high-speed future, passengers would arrive a full four hours before they set off.

As with all far out technology, it sounds like science fiction. And, in fact, vacuum trains do feature in movies like Star Trek and Logan's Run. Whilst in the dystopian future of Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury describes a "silent air-propelled train" that "slid soundlessly down its lubricated flue in the earth".

But these are far from fiction, as we found out when Future reader Seb Gibbs suggested we look into them here at Hyperdrive. Today, there are teams in the US, China and elsewhere working on the concept, with some predicting their arrival within 10 years. Whilst others believe that they could offer a potentially cheap route to launch rockets into space.
Pump it up
The history of vac-trains, as they are also known, stretches back more than 100 years to American engineer Robert Goddard. Not content with creating and building the world's first liquid-fueled rocket, Goddard also designed prototypes for rapid transport systems to connect major US cities, including a vacuum-train.

Over the years, different designs have come and gone. However, the principle behind all of them is similar: pump all of the air out of a sealed tunnel and then shoot trains, or some sort of transport capsule, through them. Such 'evacuated tubes' could be bored through rock, or laid on or above ground like conventional tracks. Some designs also allow them to cross oceans via large-bore pipes tethered at a fixed depth, although these are still very much theoretical designs.

"The advantage of a vacuum tube is that you can achieve high speeds," says Ernst G Frankel, Emeritus Professor of mechanical engineering and ocean engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It is able to do this because there is little air resistance to slow the train down. Air resistance "is a large part of the rolling resistance" of a normal train, says Frankel. Trains moving through tunnels push a wall of air ahead of them, which takes energy. They also create an area of lower pressure behind them which acts to almost pull the train back. This air resistance increases dramatically as they pick up speed and friction losses mean that more and more energy has to go into pushing the train forward against that resistance.

But get rid of the air and you get rid of the problem. Experiments conducted by Frankel and his team in the early 90s showed that it worked.

"We built a half mile long tube at the playing fields of MIT, evacuated it, and then shot things through it in order to measure what sort of velocities we could obtain," says Frankel. "We started with ping pong balls, and then went to mechanical models."

His team found that creating a near vacuum in the pipe would allow speeds of up to 930 km/h (580mph) - twice as fast as in an air filled tube.

The results were enough for the team to propose a rail system between Boston and New York, using the technology. Their plan was to reduce the journey time from more than four hours to just 40 minutes, at speeds of 300 to 350mph (480 to 560km/h).

"You would have giant pumps keeping a near vacuum in the tube, probably 20 to 30 miles apart (30-40km)" explains Prof Frankel. "The main areas for leaks would be the end stations. The train would pass through a seal as it enters and leaves the tube."

In fact, the train would have to pass through a series of airlocks that progressively reduce the pressure until the train enters the fully evacuated tunnel, where it could accelerate to top speed.

Ultimately, the huge cost of building such a system was its downfall along with the fact that the top speed was equivalent to existing bullet trains in countries like China and Japan.
Space shot
But combing vacuum train with another technology overcomes the speed barrier. A few weeks ago, I wrote about maglev (magnetic levitation) trains, vehicles that float on a bed of magnets to cut down friction. In standard set-ups these have achieved speeds of up to 581km/h (361mph). But in a vacuum, some believe they could reach speeds of more than 4,000km/h.

Again, several systems that combine these two technologies have been proposed over the years. But today, one of the main proponents is American engineer Daryl Oster, who holds the patent for what he calls Evacuated Tube Transport. His design is a six-person capsule, roughly the size of a car, which is shot along a 1.5m diameter vacuum tube using maglev technology.

He has proposed various configurations and designs from low tech, 200mph systems for local to high tech 4,000mph systems for continental and intercontinental transport. That would mean a trip from the US to China would take just a couple of hours, revolutionizing both passenger and freight transport.

He also says that it would not cost as much as people think. He quotes a 2003 study which calculated the cost of a 350mph system to be about $2million per mile, around the same basic cost of high-speed rail projects proposed in the US, although this does not take into account maintenance, personnel or rolling stock.

Oster's company does not propose building tracks itself. Instead, it sells licenses to the patented technology. So far, it says, it has sold more than 60 licenses, 12 of which are in China which is also pursuing vac-train research.

It may all sound rather far-fetched, but Frankel says that the time is right for vaccum-trains.

"Our rail technology is almost 100 years old," he says. "Our airways are becoming terribly congested, and getting to, from and through airports is very time consuming.

"A train that goes from city center to city center could be advantageous."

Daryl Oster agrees. He believes we could be using ETT for world travel in less than 10 years, with the most attractive routes between major cities. Ideally these would be separated by dry, flat, unpopulated terrain, where the ground doesn't freeze. He believes India and China are currently the most promising looking places for what he modestly calls "space travel on Earth".

But that moniker may hold true if Dr James Powell, the co-inventor of Maglev technology, gets his way. He has proposed a system called Startram that uses a maglev vacuum train to launch objects into space. The project would require a huge cannon-like tunnel to accelerate a launch vehicle to speeds of at least double those of the ETT to get into orbit. If it is built, Powell says, it could slash the cost of putting vehicles into space. Now, that would be real vacuum travel.
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Transatlantic passengers on Concorde often referred to the supersonic plane as their "time machine" for its ability to land in New York two hours before it left London. But that kind of illusion could look like child's play if so-called vacuum trains ever take off.

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The Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens

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The Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens

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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-loophole-state-backed-manipulation

Facebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents, allowing major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to prioritize addressing abuses that attract media attention or affect the US and other wealthy countries. An ex-employee exposed Facebook of allowing governments to use their platform to mislead their own citizenry.

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Facebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents despite being alerted to evidence of the wrongdoing.

The Guardian has seen extensive internal documentation showing how Facebook handled more than 30 cases across 25 countries of politically manipulative behavior that was proactively detected by company staff.

The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to prioritize addressing abuses that attract media attention or affect the US and other wealthy countries. The company acted quickly to address political manipulation affecting countries such as the US, Taiwan, South Korea and Poland, while moving slowly or not at all on cases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico and much of Latin America.

"There is a lot of harm being done on Facebook that is not being responded to because it is not considered enough of a PR risk to Facebook," said Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook who worked within the company's "integrity" organization to combat inauthentic behavior. "The cost isn't borne by Facebook. It's borne by the broader world as a whole."

Facebook pledged to combat state-backed political manipulation of its platform after the historic fiasco of the 2016 US election, when Russian agents used inauthentic Facebook accounts to deceive and divide American voters.

But the company has repeatedly failed to take timely action when presented with evidence of rampant manipulation and abuse of its tools by political leaders around the world.

Facebook fired Zhang for poor performance in September 2020. On her final day, she published a 7,800-word farewell memo describing how she had "found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry" and lambasting the company for its failure to address the abuses. "I know that I have blood on my hands by now," she wrote. News of the memo was first reported in September by BuzzFeed News.

Zhang is coming forward now in the hopes that her disclosures will force Facebook to reckon with its impact on the rest of the world.

"Facebook doesn't have a strong incentive to deal with this, except the fear that someone might leak it and make a big fuss, which is what I'm doing," she told the Guardian. "The whole point of inauthentic activity is not to be found. You can't fix something unless you know that it exists."

Liz Bourgeois, a Facebook spokesperson, said: "We fundamentally disagree with Ms Zhang's characterization of our priorities and efforts to root out abuse on our platform.

"We aggressively go after abuse around the world and have specialized teams focused on this work. As a result, we've taken down more than 100 networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior. Around half of them were domestic networks that operated in countries around the world, including those in Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and in the Asia Pacific region. Combatting coordinated inauthentic behavior is our priority. We're also addressing the problems of spam and fake engagement. We investigate each issue before taking action or making public claims about them."

Facebook did not dispute Zhang's factual assertions about her time at the company.

Sophie Zhang was a Facebook data scientist who reported widespread misuse of the platform by political leaders. Photograph: Jason Henry/The Guardian

With 2.8 billion users, Facebook plays a dominant role in the political discourse of nearly every country in the world. But the platform's algorithms and features can be manipulated to distort political debate.

One way to do this is by creating fake "engagement" - likes, comments, shares and reactions - using inauthentic or compromised Facebook accounts. In addition to shaping public perception of a political leader's popularity, fake engagement can affect Facebook's all-important news feed algorithm. Successfully gaming the algorithm can make the difference between reaching an audience of millions - or shouting into the wind.

Zhang was hired by Facebook in January 2018 to work on the team dedicated to rooting out fake engagement. She found that the vast majority of fake engagement appeared on posts by individuals, businesses or brands, but that it was also being used on what Facebook called "civic" - ie political - targets.

The most blatant example was Juan Orlando Hernández, the president of Honduras, who in August 2018 was receiving 90% of all the known civic fake engagement in the small Central American country. In August 2018, Zhang uncovered evidence that Hernández's staff was directly involved in the campaign to boost content on his page with hundreds of thousands of fake likes.

One of the administrators of Hernández's official Facebook Page was also administering hundreds of other Pages that had been set up to resemble user profiles. The staffer used the dummy Pages to deliver fake likes to Hernández's posts, the digital equivalent of bussing in a fake crowd for a speech.

This method of acquiring fake engagement, which Zhang calls "Page abuse", was made possible by a loophole in Facebook's policies. The company requires user accounts to be authentic and bars users from having more than one, but it has no comparable rules for Pages, which can perform many of the same engagements that accounts can, including liking, sharing and commenting.

The loophole has remained open due to a lack of enforcement, and it appears that it is currently being used by the ruling party of Azerbaijan to leave millions of harassing comments on the Facebook Pages of independent news outlets and Azerbaijani opposition politicians.

Page abuse is related to what Russia's Internet Research Agency did during the 2016 US election, when it set up Facebook accounts purporting to represent Americans and used them to manipulate individuals and influence political debates. Facebook called this " coordinated inauthentic behavior" (CIB) and tasked an elite team of investigators, known as threat intelligence, with uncovering and removing it. Facebook now discloses the CIB campaigns it uncovers in monthly reports, while removing the fake accounts and Pages.

But threat intelligence - and numerous Facebook managers and executives - resisted investigating both the Honduras and Azerbaijan Page abuse cases, despite evidence in both cases linking the abuse to the national government. Among the company leaders Zhang briefed about her findings were Guy Rosen, the vice-president of integrity; Katie Harbath, the former public policy director for global elections ; Samidh Chakrabarti, the then head of civic integrity; and David Agranovich, the global threat disruption lead.

The cases were particularly concerning because of the nature of the political leaders involved. Hernández was re-elected in 2017 in a contest that is widely viewed as fraudulent. His administration has been marked by allegations of rampant corruption and human rights violations. Azerbaijan is an authoritarian country without freedom of the press or free elections.

Hernández did not respond to queries sent to his press officer, attorney and minister of transparency. After publication of this article, the YAP, Azerbaijan's ruling party, denied any connection to the Pages leaving harassing comments on the 6 March Azad Soz post.

It took Facebook nearly a year to take down the Honduras network, and 14 months to remove the Azerbaijan campaign. In both cases, Facebook subsequently allowed the abuse to return. Facebook says that it uses manual and automated detection methods to monitor previous CIB enforcement cases, and that it "continuously" removes accounts and Pages connected to previously removed networks.

The lengthy delays were in large part the result of Facebook's priority system for protecting political discourse and elections.

"We have literally hundreds or thousands of types of abuse (job security on integrity eh!)," Rosen told Zhang in an April 2019 chat after she had complained about the lack of action on Honduras. "That's why we should start from the end (top countries, top priority areas, things driving prevalence, etc) and try to somewhat work our way down."

Zhang told Rosen in December 2019 that she had been informed that threat intelligence would only prioritize investigating suspected CIB networks in "the US/western Europe and foreign adversaries such as Russia/Iran/etc".

Rosen endorsed the framework, saying: "I think that's the right prioritization."

Zhang filed dozens of escalations within Facebook's task management system to alert the threat intelligence team to networks of fake accounts or Pages that were distorting political discourse, including in Albania, Mexico, Argentina, Italy, the Philippines, Afghanistan, South Korea, Bolivia, Ecuador, Iraq, Tunisia, Turkey, Taiwan, Paraguay, El Salvador, India, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Ukraine, Poland and Mongolia.

The networks often failed to meet Facebook's shifting criteria to be prioritized for CIB takedowns, but they nevertheless violated the company's policies and should have been removed.

In some of the cases that Zhang uncovered, including those in South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, Italy and Poland, Facebook took quick action, resulting in investigations by staff from threat intelligence and, in most cases, takedowns of the inauthentic accounts.

Chart showing how long it took Facebook to address cases - western and wealthier countries

In other cases, Facebook delayed taking action for months. When Zhang uncovered a network of fake accounts creating low-quality, scripted fake engagement on politicians in the Philippines in October 2019, Facebook left it to languish. But when a tiny subset of that network began creating an insignificant amount of fake engagement on Donald Trump's Page in February 2020, the company moved quickly to remove it.

Chart showing how long it took Facebook to address cases

In several cases, Facebook did not take any action.

A threat intelligence investigator found evidence that the Albanian network, which was mass-producing inauthentic comments, was linked to individuals in government, then dropped the case.

A Bolivian network of fake accounts supporting a presidential candidate in the run-up to the nation's disputed October 2019 general election was wholly ignored; as of Zhang's last day of work in September 2020, hundreds of inauthentic accounts supporting the politician continuedto operate.

Networks in Tunisia and Mongolia were similarly left uninvestigated, despite elections in Tunisia and a constitutional crisis in Mongolia.

Amid mass protests and a political crisis in Iraq in 2019, Facebook's market specialist for Iraq asked that two networks Zhang found be prioritized. An investigator agreed that the accounts should be removed, but no one ever carried out the enforcement action, and on Zhang's final day, she found approximately 1,700 fake accounts continuing to act in support of a political figure in the country.

Ultimately, Zhang argues that Facebook is too reluctant to punish powerful politicians, and that when it does act, the consequences are too lenient.

"Suppose that the punishment when you have successfully robbed a bank is that your bank robbery tools are confiscated and there is a public notice in a newspaper that says, 'We caught this person robbing a bank. They shouldn't do that,'" Zhang says. "That's essentially what's going on at Facebook. And so what's happened is that multiple national presidents have made the decision that this risk is enough for them to engage in it.

"In this analogy, the money has already been spent. It can't be taken back."

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Revealed: the Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens

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Facebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents despite being alerted to evidence of the wrongdoing. The Guardian has seen extensive internal documentation showing how Facebook handled more than 30 cases across 25 countries of politically manipulative behavior that was proactively detected by company staff.

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Controversies surrounding digital technologies used at the borders (smart borders) on refugees 

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Controversies surrounding digital technologies used at the borders (smart borders) on refugees 

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IMPLEMENTATIONS of SMART BORDERS

'Robotic lie detector tests at European airports, eye scans for refugees, and voice-imprinting software for use in asylum applications are among new technologies flagged as “troubling” in a UN report.'

These digital technologies can breach human rights. Lie detector tests at airports? Because people/refugees may be pretending/ using an alias to get past border controls? Why? Are these refugees aware of the technologies being used? Is there consent?

' “One of the key messages of the report is that we have to be paying very close attention to the disparate impact of this technology and not just assuming that because it’s technology, it’s going to be fair or be neutral or objective in some way.” '

Mentioned in the lecture, rate of technological advancement far exceeds our own understanding and comprehension of the impacts and implications of it.

Summarising the entire article would be how the new advancements in data technology where humanitarian organisations like UNHCR collect these data on refugees. And how it is becoming controversial  because as much as these organisations say that data collection on refugees is apolitical, it is actually very political. Data used to 'prevent fraud' can also be sold to data companies. Which also begs the question of why they are implementing such technologies, because it feels like an infringement on their own human right to seek refuge in host countries.

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Robotic lie detector tests at European airports, eye scans for refugees and voice-imprinting software for use in asylum applications are among new technologies flagged as "troubling" in a UN report.

The UN's special rapporteur on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, Prof Tendayi Achiume, said digital technologies can be unfair and regularly breach human rights. In her new report, she has called for a moratorium on the use of certain surveillance technologies.

Achiume, who is from Zambia, told the Guardian she was concerned about the rights of displaced people being compromised. She said there was a misconception that such technologies, often considered "a humane" option in border enforcement, are without bias.

"One of the key messages of the report is that we have to be paying very close attention to the disparate impact of this technology and not just assuming that because it's technology, it's going to be fair or be neutral or objective in some way."

She cited the example of pushback against Donald Trump's effort to build a wall between the US and Mexico. "You see that there isn't a similar sense of outrage when digital technologies are deployed to serve the same function ... if you actually look at some of the statistics, and if you look at some of the research, which I cite in my report, it turns out that border deaths have increased in places where smart borders have been implemented."

She also raised concerns about the ways in which humanitarian agencies are engaging with surveillance. The report notes that in Afghanistan, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) requires returning refugees to undergo iris registration as a prerequisite for receiving assistance.

While the UNHCR has justified the use of this technology as a way to prevent fraud, "the impact of processing such sensitive data can be grave when systems are flawed or abused", the report said.

Last year the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) partnered with Palantir Technologies, a data mining company. Palantir's role, valued at approximately $45m (£34m), is to provide software and supporting services to the WFP's data governance of 92 million aid recipients.

"Data collection is not an apolitical exercise," notes Achiume's report, "especially when powerful global north actors collect information on vulnerable populations with no regulated methods of oversights and accountability."

Covid-19 has also accelerated "biosurveillance" - focused on tracking people's movements and health. Biosurveillance has everyday uses, such as the "track and trace" app in the UK, but there are concerns about the regulation of large-scale data harvested from populations.

One example is the "Covi-Pass", a health passport developed by Mastercard and Gavi, a private-public health alliance, that is reportedly due to be rolled out across west Africa. The UN report highlighted the implications of such passports for freedom of movement, "especially for refugees".

Petra Molnar from the Refugee Law Lab in Toronto said it was clear that the pandemic was increasing digital rights violations. "State responses to the pandemic are exacerbating the turn towards biosurveillance, with refugees and people on the move acting as communities on which to test various interventions and fast-track tech development," she said.

Molnar, who contributed to the UN rapporteur's report, has noted the dehumanising impact of some technologies on displaced people in her own research. One asylum seeker she spoke to in Belgium said the amount of personal data he'd given up made him feel, "like a piece of meat without a life, just fingerprints and eye scans".

"Our conversations with refugees and people crossing borders show how little attention is being paid to the lived experiences of people who are at the sharp edges of these high-risk technological experiments," said Molnar.

Technology often outpaces legal frameworks, experts warn. Photograph: Bernd Kammerer/AP

The intersection of technology and human rights violations were highlighted in a recent investigation into the European border agency Frontex, which allegedly witnessed pushbacks of migrants in the Aegean Sea via some of its assets, including drones.

Konstantinos Kakavoulis from Homo Digitalis, a Greek organisation focused on digital rights, said technologies often outpaced the legal framework.

"There is no clear regulation for the use of drones or body-worn cameras by the Greek police," he said. "The police have signed a contract for the provision of a facial recognition software with Intracom Telecom, a Greek company, without receiving the opinion of the Greek data protection authority."

He added: "Apart from the insufficiency of legal safeguards, we also lack transparency; and this is not only remarkable, but highly problematic."

Achiume said that until the impact of surveillance technologies on human rights could be understood, use of such technologies should be halted. "Until we can understand and mitigate those harms, there should just be a moratorium on them."

This article was amended on 18 November 2020. Following publication Palantir contacted us to clarify that its role with the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) does not involve data sharing and that all data remains under the control of the WFP.

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UN warns of impact of smart borders on refugees: 'Data collection isn't apolitical'

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Robotic lie detector tests at European airports, eye scans for refugees and voice-imprinting software for use in asylum applications are among new technologies flagged as "troubling" in a UN report. The UN's special rapporteur on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, Prof Tendayi Achiume, said digital technologies can be unfair and regularly breach human rights.

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In-vitro fertilization.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7721055/

https://www.dovepress.com/perception-of-key-ethical-issues-in-assisted-reproductive-technology-a-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-IJWH

Summary:

In IVF there is an intricate interaction between rapid scientific development and changing social values. Many believe that they are allowed to undergo ICF as they have ‘ownership’ of their gametes and embryo.Many concerns regarding the costs and effects, and safety of IVF have transcended into more complex questions about what it means to give birth to children.

Opinions on IVF:

Positive: It helps to curb the issue of infertility and pregnancy complications. It also gives same-sex couples a chance to have to produce offspring that contain parts of their genes as opposed to adoption.

Negative: It conflicts with the religious beliefs that a child should be produced by parents in a natural way, without the help of science. It also poses the issue of selective pregnancy such as choosing the gender of the child as the reproductive cells are artificially fertilized and chosen. There could also be the segregation of the socio-economic classes as the rich can afford such technology while the lower income still have to resort to the traditional method of reproduction.It leads to the destruction of embryos and can also end up being dangerous for the women undergoing this treatment. This can be seen as a beg taboo for those who are very pro-life. Moreover there are also beliefs in religions such as Christianity, that a child is a god-given gift. It should not be made in labs. IVF is also a very invasive procedure and dangerous one. Hence many do believe that this should not be carried out.

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robotic lie detector test, eye scans, voice-imprinting - deemed as troubling, unfair and breach human rights. UNHCR however, has justified the use these technology to prevent fraud and collect information on vulnerable populations. While these technology can be used to prevent fraud, processing such sensitive data can be grave when such systems are flawed or even abused. Today, COVID-19 has also played apart in accelerated biosurveillance as government travks movement and health of people in an attempt to curb the spread of the virus. It is clear that the pandemic is increasing digital rights violation. Eg. Track and Trace app in the UK and TraceTogether in SG. In the perspective of an refugee, it was said that he “felt like a piece of meat without a life, just fingerprints and eye scans.” This is highly problematic. Such uses of technology should be halted for the time being just until everyone fully understand the use of it so as to feel safe.

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there were 3 types of experiments that were carried out for various purposes— survival of military personnel, test drugs & treatments, and the nazi’s racial & ideological views.
an ethical perspective is deontology which is the normative ethical theory that ”human beings should be treated with dignity and respect because they have rights.”
a controversy is that there is no consent given upon being selected for human experiments.
an existing safeguard against human testing is Section 10(2) of the Human Rights Act which specifically prohibits involuntary medical or scientific experimentation– a prohibition which stems from Nazi experimentation in the Second World War, but remains relevant today.

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From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany carried out a campaign to "cleanse" German society of individuals viewed as biological threats to the nation's "health." The Nazis enlisted the help of physicians and medically trained geneticists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists to develop racial health policies. These policies began with the mass sterilization of many people in hospitals and other institutions and ended with the near annihilation of European Jewry.

Medical Experiments in the Third Reich

Unethical medical experimentation (without patient consent or any safeguards) carried out during the Third Reich may be divided into three categories.
1. Experiments dealing with the survival of military personnel
Many experiments in the camps intended to facilitat e the survival of in the field. For example, at Axis military personnel S cientists there also carried out so-called freezing experiments on Dachau, physicians from the German air force and from the German Experimental Institution for Aviation conducted high-altitude experiments on prisoners to determine the maximum altitude from which crews of damaged aircraft could parachute to safety. prisoners to find an effective treatment for hypothermia. Prisoners were also used to test various methods of making seawater drinkable.
2. Experiments to test drugs and treatments
aimed to develop and test drugs and treatment methods for injuries and illnesses which German military and occupation personnel encountered in the field. At the German concentration camps of Other experiments Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Natzweiler, Buchenwald, and Neuengamme, scientists used camp inmates t o test immunization compounds and antibodies for the prevention and treatment of contagious diseases, including malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and infectious hepatitis. Physicians at Ravensbrück conducted experiments in bone-grafting and tested newly developed sulfa (sulfanilamide) drugs. At Natzweiler and Sachsenhausen, prisoners were exposed to phosgene and mustard gas in order to test possible antidotes.
3. Experiments to advance Nazi racial and ideological goals
A third category of medical experimentation sought to advance the racial and ideological tenets of the Nazi worldview. The most infamous were the experiments of at Auschwitz. He also directed experiments on Josef Mengele on twins of all ages Additional Roma (Gypsies), as did Werner Fischer at Sachsenhausen, to determine how different "races" withstood various contagious diseases. The research of August Hirt at Strasbourg University also intended to establish "Jewish racial inferiority." gruesome experiments meant to further Nazi racial goals included a series of sterilization experiments, undertaken primarily at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. S cientists tested a number of methods in an effort to develop an efficient and inexpensive procedure for the mass sterilization of Jews, Roma, and other groups Nazi leaders considered to be racially or genetically undesirable.

The Nuremberg Code

The Nuremberg Code was created In the aftermath of the discovery of the camp experiments and subsequent trials to address abuses committed by medical professionals during the Holocaust. The Nuremberg Code included the principle of informed consent and required standards for research.

Last Edited: Aug 30, 2006

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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German physicians conducted inhumane experiments on prisoners in the camps during the Holocaust. Learn more about Nazi medical experiments during WW2.

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Chips monitoring Chinese Students (ABC, 2018)

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Chips monitoring Chinese Students (ABC, 2018)

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Summary:
Chinese schools have begun enforcing "smart uniforms" embedded with computer chips to monitor student movements and prevent them from skipping classes. Eleven schools in the south-west province of Guizhou have introduced the uniforms, which were developed by local tech firm Guizhou Guanyu Technology. As students enter the school, the time and date is recorded along with a short video that parents can access via a mobile app. Facial recognition further ensures that each uniform is worn by its rightful owner to prevent students from cheating the system.

Key points:

Skipping class or leaving the classroom without permission triggers an alarm

GPS system can track student movements even beyond the school grounds

Beijing has made regular calls on all schools to develop "smart campuses"

Pros:
- Ensures protection / safety for the child / safety for students at large (especially useful in Covid-19 context- contact tracing)
- Accountability by the school/teachers
- Parents are more assured (child's safety and whereabouts)

Cons & Limitations:
- Lack of privacy
- Restrict freedom (constantly tracked)
- Data leak/ data security
- Are there any health risks?

Possible Controversial issues:
- Privacy vs Security
- The issue of consent (students/parents/school)

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Chinese schools have begun enforcing "smart uniforms" embedded with computer chips to monitor student movements and prevent them from skipping classes.

Skipping class or leaving the classroom without permission triggers an alarm

A GPS system tracks student movements even beyond the school grounds

Beijing has made regular calls on all schools to develop "smart campuses"

Eleven schools in the south-west province of Guizhou have introduced the uniforms, which were developed by local tech firm Guizhou Guanyu Technology.

As students enter the school, the time and date is recorded along with a short video that parents can access via a mobile app.

Facial recognition further ensures that each uniform is worn by its rightful owner to prevent students from cheating the system.

Skipping classes triggers an alarm to inform teachers and parents of the truancy, while an automatic voice alarm activates if a student walks out of school without permission.

A GPS system tracks student movements even beyond the school grounds.

The two chips - inserted into each uniform's shoulders - can withstand up to 500 washes and 150 degrees Celsius, the company told state media Global Times.

Alarms will also sound if a student falls asleep in class, while parents can monitor purchases their child makes at the school and set spending limits via a mobile app, according to the company's official website.

The company released a public statement via popular Chinese social media site Weibo saying the uniforms "focus on safety issues", and provide a "smart management method" that benefits students, teachers and parents.

Guanyu Technology's marketing manager also bragged of the uniforms' capabilities on a personal Weibo account.

"You go to any school and ask the security guard how many students there are in the school today. He definitely can't give you an answer, but we can," the post read.

On its website, the development company said the uniforms were designed to "fully implement the state policy of actively constructing smart campuses and smart education management for the development of education".

In recent years, Beijing has made regular calls on all schools to develop "smart campuses" in a push to digitalise education.

'Don't children have human rights and privacy?'

A GPS system tracks students' movements even beyond the school grounds.(Supplied: Guanyun Technology )

Despite all the benefits touted by the company, the uniforms have prompted backlash on social media.

"If you were a child, would you like to be monitored 24 hours a day?" asked one Weibo user with the nickname Sangguo_Sunny.

"Don't children have human rights and privacy?" user Dawson-HO said.

But blogger Yi Zhi Sirius defended the new uniforms, saying "the uniforms will come in handy when it comes to locating missing students".

Guanyu Technology's marketing manager also bragged of the uniforms' capabilities on a personal Weibo account.(Supplied: Guanyu Technology )

Speaking to the Global Times, Lin Zongwu, principal of Number 11 School of Renhuai in Guizhou, said although the school had the ability to track students at all times, they used this technology sparingly.

"We choose not to check the accurate location of students after school, but when the student is missing and skipping classes, the uniforms help locate them," Mr Lin said, adding the attendance rate had increased since the intelligent uniforms were introduced.

Guanyu Technology responded to criticism on Weibo, saying the company did "respect and protect human rights".

"The smart uniform does not track students' every single move all the time," the company wrote.

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Chinese schools enforce 'smart uniforms' with GPS tracking system to monitor students

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Chinese schools have begun enforcing "smart uniforms" embedded with computer chips to monitor student movements and prevent them from skipping classes. Skipping class or leaving the classroom without permission triggers an alarm A GPS system tracks student movements even beyond the school grounds Beijing has made regular calls on all schools to develop "smart campuses" Eleven schools in the south-west province of Guizhou have introduced the uniforms, which were developed by local tech firm Guizhou Guanyu Technology.

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Why Algorithms can be Racist and Sexist (Vox, 2020)

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Why Algorithms can be Racist and Sexist (Vox, 2020)

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Summary:
Algorithmic bias can be seen in two primary ways: accuracy and impact. An AI can have different accuracy rates for different demographic groups. Similarly, an algorithm can make vastly different decisions when applied to different populations.

Importantly, when you think of data, you might think of formal studies in which demographics and representation are carefully considered, limitations are weighed, and then the results are peer-reviewed. That’s not necessarily the case with the AI-based systems that might be used to make a decision about you. Let’s take one source of data everyone has access to: the internet. One study found that, by teaching an artificial intelligence to crawl through the internet — and just reading what humans have already written — the system would produce prejudices against black people and women. Another example of how training data can produce sexism in an algorithm occurred a few years ago, when Amazon tried to use AI to build a résumé-screening tool. According to Reuters, the company’s hope was that technology could make the process of sorting through job applications more efficient. It built a screening algorithm using résumés the company had collected for a decade, but those résumés tended to come from men. That meant the system, in the end, learned to discriminate against women. It also ended up factoring in proxies for gender, like whether an applicant went to a women’s college. (Amazon says the tool was never used and that it was nonfunctional for several reasons.)

*Food for thought: Given that it is known that there is bias in algorithms, why do we (instituitions, companies, governments etc.) still continue to use (and rely on) them?

Just because a technology is accurate doesn’t make it fair or ethical. For instance, the Chinese government has used artificial intelligence to track and racially profile its largely Muslim Uighur minority, about 1 million of whom are believed to be living in internment camps.

Relevant controversial issues:

Also consider Intersectionality  (intersecting and overlapping social identities- which could prove to be empowering for some, yet oppressing for others)

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This story is part of a group of stories called

Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing - and changing us.

Humans are error-prone and biased, but that doesn't mean that algorithms are necessarily better. Still, the tech is already making important decisions about your life and potentially ruling over which political advertisements you see, how your application to your dream job is screened, how police officers are deployed in your neighborhood, and even predicting your home's risk of fire.

But these systems can be biased based on who builds them, how they're developed, and how they're ultimately used. This is commonly known as algorithmic bias. It's tough to figure out exactly how systems might be susceptible to algorithmic bias, especially since this technology often operates in a corporate black box. We frequently don't know how a particular artificial intelligence or algorithm was designed, what data helped build it, or how it works.

Typically, you only know the end result: how it has affected you, if you're even aware that AI or an algorithm was used in the first place. Did you get the job? Did you see that Donald Trump ad on your Facebook timeline? Did a facial recognition system identify you? That makes addressing the biases of artificial intelligence tricky, but even more important to understand.

Machine learning-based systems are trained on data. Lots of it.

When thinking about "machine learning" tools (machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence), it's better to think about the idea of "training." This involves exposing a computer to a bunch of data - any kind of data - and then that computer learns to make judgments, or predictions, about the information it processes based on the patterns it notices.

For instance, in a verysimplified example, let's say you wanted to train your computer system to recognize whether an object is a book, based on a few factors, like its texture, weight, and dimensions. A human might be able to do this, but a computer could do it more quickly.

To train the system, you show the computer metrics attributed to a lot of different objects. You give the computer system the metrics for every object, and tell the computer when the objects are books and when they're not. After continuously testing and refining, the system is supposed to learn what indicates a book and, hopefully, be able to predict in the future whether an object is a book, depending on those metrics, without human assistance.

That sounds relatively straightforward. And it might be, if your first batch of data was classified correctly and included a good range of metrics featuring lots of different types of books. However, these systems are often applied to situations that have much more serious consequences than this task, and in scenarios where there isn't necessarily an "objective" answer. Often, the data on which many of these decision-making systems are trained or checked are often not complete, balanced, or selected appropriately, and that can be a major source of - although certainly not the only source - of algorithmic bias.

Nicol Turner-Lee, a Center for Technology Innovation fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, explains that we can think about algorithmic bias in two primary ways: accuracy and impact. An AI can have different accuracy rates for different demographic groups. Similarly, an algorithm can make vastly different decisions when applied to different populations.

Importantly, when you think of data, you might think of formal studies in which demographics and representation are carefully considered, limitations are weighed, and then the results are peer-reviewed. That's not necessarily the case with the AI-based systems that might be used to make a decision about you. Let's take one source of data everyone has access to: the internet. One study found that, by teaching an artificial intelligence to crawl through the internet - and just reading what humans have already written - the system would produce prejudices against black people and women.

Another example of how training data can produce sexism in an algorithm occurred a few years ago, when Amazon tried to use AI to build a résumé-screening tool. According to Reuters, the company's hope was that technology could make the process of sorting through job applications more efficient. It built a screening algorithm using résumés the company had collected for a decade, but those résumés tended to come from men. That meant the system, in the end, learned to discriminate against women. It also ended up factoring in proxies for gender, like whether an applicant went to a women's college. (Amazon says the tool was never used and that it was nonfunctional for several reasons.)

Amid discussions of algorithmic biases, companies using AI might say they're taking precautions, taking steps to use more representative training data and regularly auditing their systems for unintended bias and disparate impact against certain groups. But Lily Hu, a doctoral candidate at Harvard in applied mathematics and philosophy who studies AI fairness, says those aren't assurances that your system will perform fairly in the future.

"You don't have any guarantees because your algorithm performs 'fairly' on your old dataset," Hu told Recode. "That's just a fundamental problem of machine learning. Machine learning works on old data [and] on training data. And it doesn't work on new data, because we haven't collected that data yet."

Still, shouldn't we just make more representative datasets? That might be part of the solution, though it's worth noting that not all efforts aimed at building better data sets are ethical. And it's not just about the data. As Karen Hao of the MIT Tech Review explains, AI could also be designed to frame a problem in a fundamentally problematic way. For instance, an algorithm designed to determine "creditworthiness" that's programmed to maximize profit could ultimately decide to give out predatory, subprime loans.

Here's another thing to keep in mind: Just because a tool is tested for bias - which assumes that engineers who are checking for bias actually understand how bias manifests and operates - against one group doesn't mean it is tested for bias against another type of group. This is also true when an algorithm is considering several types of identity factors at the same time: A tool may deemed fairly accurate on white women, for instance, but that doesn't necessarily mean it works with black women.

In some cases, it might be impossible to find training data free of bias. Take historical data produced by the United States criminal justice system. It's hard to imagine that data produced by an institution rife with systemic racism could be used to build out an effective and fair tool. As researchers at New York University and the AI Now Institute outline, predictive policing tools can be fed "dirty data," including policing patterns that reflect police departments' conscious and implicit biases, as well as police corruption.

The foundational assumptions of engineers can also be biased

So you might have the data to build an algorithm. But who designs it, and who decides how it's deployed? Who gets to decide what level of accuracy and inaccuracy for different groups is acceptable? Who gets to decide which applications of AI are ethical and which aren't?

While there isn't a wide range of studies on the demographics of the artificial intelligence field, we do know that AI tends to be dominated by men. And the "high tech" sector, more broadly, tends to overrepresent white people and underrepresent black and Latinx people, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Turner-Lee emphasizes that we need to think about who gets a seat at the table when these systems are proposed, since those people ultimately shape the discussion about ethical deployments of their technology.

But there's also a broader question of what questions artificial intelligence can help us answer. Hu, the Harvard researcher, argues that for many systems, the question of building a "fair" system is essentially nonsensical, because those systems try to answer social questions that don't necessarily have an objective answer. For instance, Hu says algorithms that claim to predict a person's recidivism don't ultimately address the ethical question of whether someone deserves parole.

"There's not an objective way to answer that question," Hu says. "When you then insert an AI system, an algorithmic system, [or] a computer, that doesn't change the fundamental context of the problem, which is that the problem has no objective answer. It's fundamentally a question of what our values are, and what the purpose of the criminal justice system is."

That in mind, some algorithms probably shouldn't exist, or at least they shouldn't come with such a high risk of abuse. Just because a technology is accurate doesn't make it fair or ethical. For instance, the Chinese government has used artificial intelligence to track and racially profile its largely Muslim Uighur minority, about 1 million of whom are believed to be living in internment camps.

Transparency is a first step for accountability

One of the reasons algorithmic bias can seem so opaque is because, on our own, we usually can't tell when it's happening (or if an algorithm is even in the mix). That was one of the reasons why the controversy over a husband and wife who both applied for an Apple Card - and got widely different credit limits - attracted so much attention, Turner-Lee says. It was a rare instance in which two people, who at least appeared to be exposed to the same algorithm and could easily compare notes. The details of this case still aren't clear, though the company's credit card is now being investigated by regulators.

But consumers being able to make apples-to-apples comparisons of algorithmic results are rare, and that's part of why advocates are demanding more transparency about how systems work and their accuracy. Ultimately, it's probably not a problem we can solve on the individual level. Even if we do understand that algorithms can be biased, that doesn't mean companies will be forthright in allowing outsiders to study their artificial intelligence. That's created a challenge for those pushing for more equitable, technological systems. How can you critique an algorithm - a sort of black box - if you don't have true access to its inner workings or the capacity to test a good number of its decisions?

Companies will claim to be accurate, overall, but won't always reveal their training data (remember, that's the data that the artificial intelligence trains on before evaluating newdata, like, say, your job application). Many don't appear to be subjecting themselves to audit by a third-party evaluator or publicly sharing how their systems fare when applied to different demographic groups. Some researchers, such as Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, say that sharing this demographic information about both the data used to train and the data used to check artificial intelligence should be a baseline definition of transparency.

Artificial intelligence is new, but that doesn't mean existing laws don't apply

We will likely need new laws to regulate artificial intelligence, and some lawmakers are catching up on the issue. There's a bill that would force companies to check their AI systems for bias through the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). And legislation has also been proposed to regulate facial recognition, and even to ban the technology from federally assisted public housing.

But Turner-Lee emphasizes that new legislation doesn't mean existing laws or agencies don't have the power to look over these tools, even if there's some uncertainty. For instance, the FTC oversees deceptive acts and practices, which could give the agency authority over some AI-based tools.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which investigates employment discrimination, is reportedly looking into at least two cases involving algorithmic discrimination. At the same time, the White House is encouraging federal agencies that are figuring out how to regulate artificial intelligence to keep technological innovation in mind. That raises the challenge of whether the government is prepared to study and govern this technology, and figure out how existing laws apply.

"You have a group of people that really understand it very well, and that would be technologists," Turner-Lee cautions, "and a group of people who don't really understand it at all, or have minimal understanding, and that would be policymakers."
Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.
That's not to say there aren't technical efforts to "de-bias" flawed artificial intelligence, but it's important to keep in mind that the technology won't be a solution to fundamental challenges of fairness and discrimination. And, as the examples we've gone through indicate, there's no guarantee companies building or using this tech will make sure it's not discriminatory, especially without a legal mandate to do so. It would seem it's up to us, collectively, to push the government to rein in the tech and to make sure it helps us more than it might already be harming us.

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Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing - and changing us. Humans are error-prone and biased, but that doesn't mean that algorithms are necessarily better. Still, the tech is already making important decisions about your life and potentially ruling over which political advertisements you see, how your application to your dream job is screened, how police officers are deployed in your neighborhood, and even predicting your home's risk of fire.

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Electronic monitoring bracelets (The Conversation, 2019)

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Electronic monitoring bracelets (The Conversation, 2019)

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Summary:
The rise of electronic monitoring- here it is used in the corrections systems and it refers to the tagging of a person as a form of surveillance, usually in the form of a GPS-enabled ankle bracelet. When an offender is subject to electronic monitoring, a computer database is updated with information about the rules he or she has been instructed to follow. Each jurisdiction and each agency may have their own database, so where the offender appears in the database will depend on who is supervising the electronic monitoring order. The database is then monitored by enforcement authorities, although this is sometimes outsourced to private providers or overseas companies. While the data is generally sent from the offender’s GPS device to the monitoring agency in real time, there can be delays in how long it takes for that information to be passed to police or corrective services.

[Context of Crime & Punishment]
Pros:
- Tracking of their whereabouts (always foolproof?)
- Lower crime rates (recidivism)- therefore by implication, country is safer (may not be so?)- deterrence?
- alternative solution for those who have committed minor crimes
- Lack of space in the prison

Cons & Limitations:
- Offender's perspective: while it is true that they have committed an offence/crime, what are the implications/effects on them wearing these? (mark/identified: possible discrimination from others?)
- Health risks?
- May not ensure lower crimes
- does not solve the root issues of crime

Possible Controversial Issues:

Consider other possible contexts where such electronic monitoring could be employed and the possible controversies/tensions such use could pose:
- used on immigrants (refugees)
- contact tracing

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The man arrested after a deadly gun attack in Darwin Tuesday night is reported to have been on parole and wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet.

This leads to the same reaction we see following any high-profile crime. How could such a thing happen?

People may speculate that the criminal justice agencies involved have somehow dropped the ball. The offender was on their radar, after all.

Read more: Online tools can help people in disasters, but do they represent everyone?

While this finger-pointing may serve a cathartic function, it is important we also question our expectations before assuming a failure occurred.

We need to understand what electronic monitoring intends to achieve, how it works, and what are its capabilities and limitations.

Electronic tagging

In the context of the corrections system, electronic monitoring refers to the tagging of a person as a form of surveillance, usually in the form of a GPS-enabled ankle bracelet.

In Australia, each state and territory uses electronic monitoring differently, guided by their own legislative frameworks.

Practices vary considerably between jurisdictions. For example, in some places, certain offenders are targeted (high-risk recidivists, those who repeatedly reoffend, for example). In others, specific types of offences are the focus (such as child sex offences).

The application of electronic monitoring even differs between offenders, as the supervising agency uses it for reasons specific to each person.

A police department might use electronic monitoring to ensure a domestic violence perpetrator does not visit the victim before a trial. A probation officer might require an offender to wear a bracelet for 12 months to ensure they are attending treatment and meeting their curfew. A parole officer could place the GPS tracking condition on an offender for the first three months following release from prison to better understand how the parolee spends his or her time.

Each of these experiences will be quite different, as each is intended to fulfil a unique aim.

Ordinarily, electronic monitoring is used as a tool of incapacitation and deterrence.

In the first instance, an offender may be told to follow a particular rule - for example, to be home by 8pm, to stay away from the victim, to attend a treatment program, or not to go within 1km of a school. Electronic monitoring allows authorities to monitor the person's compliance with such a condition.

In the latter instance, an offender may be deterred from certain behaviour if they believe their actions are likely to be detected through electronic monitoring.

Monitoring actions

When an offender is subject to electronic monitoring, a computer database is updated with information about the rules he or she has been instructed to follow. Each jurisdiction and each agency may have their own database, so where the offender appears in the database will depend on who is supervising the electronic monitoring order.

The database is then monitored by enforcement authorities, although this is sometimes outsourced to private providers or overseas companies. While the data is generally sent from the offender's GPS device to the monitoring agency in real time, there can be delays in how long it takes for that information to be passed to police or corrective services.

What occurs when an offender breaches one of the rules and a computer alert is generated depends on factors such as legislation and the priority of a case influencing the response. The database includes information about what to do in the event of specific kinds of breaches with specific offenders.

In some cases, an alarm on the device may go off or, very rarely, the police may be immediately notified.

Most often, for routine cases and ordinary breaches, the monitoring agency will notify the offender's supervisor (such as a parole officer or a local police department), who will then determine how to proceed.

There may be a lag of several days during this process. For example, if a low-risk offender misses their home curfew on Friday night (as determined by the GPS bracelet), the parole officer will not receive notification of this breach until Monday morning.

The pros and cons of tagging

There are a range of benefits and disadvantages to the electronic monitoring of offenders.

It can be effective in holding offenders accountable, protecting victims and enhancing community safety and preventing crimes. These come with important cost savings, particularly when offenders can be safety monitored in the community in lieu of imprisonment or as a mechanism of early release from prison.

But some of the downfalls are that offenders can tamper with their devices, and there can be GPS dead zones - particularly in a geographically vast country such as Australia. There may also be human error in using the systems, such as improper monitoring or unreasonable decision-making after an alert.

Yet collectively, the research evidence highlights that electronic monitoring can be an effective tool for discouraging recidivism. But it is only that: a tool.

The most effective practices for supervising offenders in the community include those that identify and reduce a person's risks for continued criminal behaviour.

Read more: AI can help in crime prevention, but we still need a human in charge

Electronic monitoring will be most effective when it is used to support supervision that limits a person's access to chances to commit crime. Such supervision should help them redesign their routines so that any risky settings are avoided and are replaced with more positive influences.

Thus, rather than simply giving offenders a long list of rules for what not to do, effective probation and parole strategies help offenders lead productive lives.

More broadly, it is imperative that correctional authorities provide rehabilitative interventions that address the underlying factors that contribute toward a person's criminal behaviour. The most effective approaches use cognitive-behavioural techniques to give offenders skills that encourage good decision-making.

Yet electronic monitoring cannot "fix" an offender's impulsivity, lack of empathy, or any other underlying crime-conducive traits. Thus we should not confuse a technological aid with meaningful treatment.

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Electronic monitoring bracelets are only crime deterrence tools, they can't 'fix' offenders

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The man arrested after a deadly gun attack in Darwin Tuesday night is reported to have been on parole and wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet. This leads to the same reaction we see following any high-profile crime. How could such a thing happen? People may speculate that the criminal justice agencies involved have somehow dropped the ball.

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China’s Social Credit System (South China Morning Post, 2020)

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China’s Social Credit System (South China Morning Post, 2020)

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Merits for the Chinese government to implement this policy/system:
- To set and direct ("police"?) moral conduct/behaviour of society
- To transform / "control" social behaviour (especially for rural villages or even the cities- depending on how one sees it. For rural villages, the need for improvements as it is still relatively backward and slow whereas for cities, need to impose greater social control with possibly increased calls for freedom and independence/autonomy from the state. )
- Social accountability (everyone's behaviour/actions or the lack thereof impacts on another)

Possible criticisms of this system:
- Biased system (people/ the information collectors may not make fair/ subjective judgments)- may lead to nepotism or bribery
- Also consider: Would technology definitely/necessarily do a better job?
- People's good behaviour to earn credits is not genuine: other motivations (selfish/ self-interests at hand) as they benefit as well.
- may not be fair to expect everyone, especially the elderly (seen in the example: 80 years old still has to provide labour) to contribute to this social credit system.

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national development and reform commission (ndrc)

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how does china’s social credit system work?

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why has china set up a social credit system?

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what is the progress of china’s social credit system

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why is china’s social credit system controversial?

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What is China's social credit system and why is it controversial?

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China's social credit system is a set of databases and initiatives that monitor and assess the trustworthiness of individuals, companies and government entities.

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The complicated truth about China's social credit system (wired.co.uk, 2019)

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The complicated truth about China's social credit system (wired.co.uk, 2019)

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China's social credit system has been compared to Black Mirror, Big Brother and every other dystopian future sci-fi writers can think up. The reality is more complicated - and in some ways, worse.

The idea for social credit came about back in 2007, with projects announced by the government as an opt-in system in 2014. But there's a difference between the official government system and private, corporate versions, though the latter's scoring system that includes shopping habits and friendships is often conflated with the former.

Brits are well accustomed to credit checks: data brokers such as Experian trace the timely manner in which we pay our debts, giving us a score that's used by lenders and mortgage providers. We also have social-style scores, and anyone who has shopped online with eBay has a rating on shipping times and communication, while Uber drivers and passengers both rate each other; if your score falls too far, you're out of luck.

China's social credit system expands that idea to all aspects of life, judging citizens' behaviour and trustworthiness. Caught jaywalking, don't pay a court bill, play your music too loud on the train - you could lose certain rights, such as booking a flight or train ticket. "The idea itself is not a Chinese phenomenon," says Mareike Ohlberg, research associate at the Mercator Institute for China Studies. Nor is the use, and abuse, of aggregated data for analysis of behaviour. "But if [the Chinese system] does come together as envisioned, it would still be something very unique," she says. "It's both unique and part of a global trend."

What is China's social credit system?

Unveiled in a 2014 plan, pieces of the system are already in place, and the Chinese government appears to be targeting a 2020 goal to get the rest in place, though that's less a deadline and instead marks the end of a planning period, says Samantha Hoffman, non-resident fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

As yet, there's no one social credit system. Instead, local governments have their own social record systems that work differently, while unofficial private versions are operated at companies such Ant Financial's Zhima Credit, better known as Sesame Credit. Ant Financial is the payment firm spun out of Alibaba. The systems use shopping habits among other data to inform credit-style scores, on an opt-in basis. "There is no single, nationally coordinated system," Ohlberg says. And the pilots that do exist don't all work in the same way.

The private systems, including Ant Financial's Sesame Credit, often get conflated with the government plans, though they aren't part of the official system. To be a bit more confusing, the data collected by private companies is expected to be hoovered up by the government in the future, and some of the data is already used in government trials. Sesame Credit says this is only with user consent.

That leads to misunderstanding of what the social credit system actually is, notes Ohlberg. "What happened is some of the media took the private pilots, like Sesame Credit... and presented it as the social credit system," she says. It's not officially part of the system, and doesn't have a license; though the pilot is approved, and indeed encouraged, it could one day be shut down by the government. "It kind of rides on the fashion for social credit."

What's troubling is when those private systems link up to the government rankings - which is already happening with some pilots, she says. "You'll have sort of memorandum of understanding like arrangements between the city and, say, Alibaba and Tencent about data exchanges and including that in assessments of citizens," Ohlberg adds. That's a lot of data being collected with little protection, and no algorithmic transparency about how it's analysed to spit out a score or ranking, though Sesame does share some details about what types of data is used.

How does the social credit system work?

The target, eventually, is that the government system will be country wide, with businesses given a "unified social credit code" and citizens an identity number, all linked to permanent record. "If you go to a credit China website, and you have an entity's credit code, you can type that in and pull up credit records," explains Hoffman. "Individuals will have ID-linked codes." It's less a score, she says, and more of a record.

Some reports talk about a blacklist; that's part of the official government social credit system, which means if you owe the government money, for example, you could lose certain rights. There's a difference between getting a low social credit score and being blacklisted by the government, such as for refusing to pay a fine.

The criteria that go into a social credit ranking depends on where you are, notes Ohlberg. "It's according to which place you're in, because they have their own catalogs," she says. It can range from not paying fines when you're deemed fully able to, misbehaving on a train, standing up a taxi, or driving through a red light.

One city, Rongcheng, gives all residents 1,000 points to start. Authorities make deductions for bad behaviour like traffic violations, and add points for good behaviour such as donating to charity. One regulation Ohlberg recently read specifically addresses stealing electricity. Of course, you'll have to get caught first or be reported by someone else. While facial recognition is infamously used to spot jaywalkers, in some cities it's not so automated, Ohlberg notes.

Private projects, such as Sesame Credit, hoover up all sorts of data on its 400 million customers, from how much time they spend playing video games (that's bad) to whether they're a parent (that's good). That can be shared with other companies. One infamous example is Sesame Credit linking up with the Baihe dating site, so would be partners can judge each other on their looks as well as their social credit score; that system is opt-in.

So far, taking part in both the private and government versions is technically voluntary; in the future, the official social credit system will be mandatory. That said, there's plenty of pressure to take part now. "There are incentives for participating, and disincentives for not participating," Hoffman notes.

What happens if you're blacklisted?

Liu Hu is a journalist in China, writing about censorship and government corruption. Because of his work, Liu has been arrested and fined - and blacklisted. Liu found he was named on a List of Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement by the Supreme People's Court as "not qualified" to buy a plane ticket, and banned from travelling some train lines, buying property, or taking out a loan.

"There was no file, no police warrant, no official advance notification. They just cut me off from the things I was once entitled to," he told The Globe and Mail. "What's really scary is there's nothing you can do about it. You can report to no one. You are stuck in the middle of nowhere."

What recourse is there? With the government system, if you want to be removed from a blacklist, you can either pay your bill or appeal to the court, says Jing Zeng, a researcher at the University of Zurich. "Bring your money to the court and then you get removed from the system," she says. "It's not a judicial system by itself, it's still the court you need to [appeal to]."

However, the Chinese justice system leaves much to be desired, says Hoffman. "There are no genuine protections for the people and entities subject to the system," she says.

"In China there is no such thing as the rule of law. Regulations that can be largely apolitical on the surface can be political when the Communist Party of China (CCP) decides to use them for political purposes." In April 2018, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) sent letters to international airlines demanding they show Taiwan as part of China, saying the government would "make a record of your company's serious dishonesty and take disciplinary actions" for any that didn't comply; they all eventually did. The system used to pressure the airlines was a pilot of the Civil Aviation Industry Credit Measures, which is part of the official social credit system.

Alongside the potential for abuse of power, the knock-on effects of statewide surveillance, and the likelihood of incorrect data, Ohlberg notes the a few bad marks on a social credit record could spark a negative spiral.

While it varies by programme, in some local pilots a positive rating means discounts and benefits, such as a simplified process with bureaucracies. If you have a low rating, you may have extra paperwork or fees. "Once you're in a low category, it makes it difficult," she says. "I see a huge potential for negative spiral." Such a system could further divide society, creating classes of people depending on their social credit - and this is where comparisons to Black Mirror pop up.

Why is China building this?

It's all about building trust, says the Chinese government. The 2014 document describing the government's plans note that as "trust-keeping is insufficiently rewarded, the costs of breaking trust tend to be low."

And Chinese society does have trust issues, says Ohlberg, be it food quality scandal, pollution, or employees not paying their workers. "But the system can also be used to enforce vague laws like endangering national security or unity," she adds. Zeng says that can include food safety and product quality, major problems in the country. "It's a big problem in Chinese society," she says. "They are punishing companies for this kind of bad behaviour."

Plus, it could help build alternative means of financial credit, says Ohlberg, as many people in China live outside financial systems, so have no trustworthy credit rating. "Some of the earlier pilots of the social credit system that preceded the major policy plan that was published in 2014, were actually building a social credit system for the countryside," she says. "The majority of people there wouldn't have financial banking data on them." For businesses, a social credit system could also be used for micro enterprises, which couldn't be assessed with traditional criteria.

Hoffman isn't buying that argument, saying such a system is about government power. "If solving problems was the real goal, the CCP would not need social credit to do it," she says. "China's social credit system is a state-driven program designed to do one thing, to uphold and expand the Chinese Communist Party's power."

She adds that social credit is a tech-enabled way to tie political power to social and economic development that's been discussed in the country since the 1980s, an automation of Chairman Mao's Mass Line - a term to describe how the party's leadership shaped and managed society. "In Mao's China, the Mass Line relied on ideological mass mobilisation, using Mao Zedong's personal charisma, to force participation," Hoffman says. "The CCP could no longer, after the Mao era, rely on ideological mobilisation as the primary tool for operationalising social management."

Is there more than social credit?

China's social credit scheme is developing, but it is only one part of the country's surveillance state. As well as tight controls on the web content which is available, through the country's national firewall, there is monitoring and censorship of social media.

Ahead of the 30-year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests researchers at the University of Hong Kong found that critical posts on the social networks of Weibo and Wechat were removed. Leading video platforms also all simultaneously turned off comments saying system upgrades were needed. There have also been crackdowns on the use of VPNs, which can help protect people's privacy online.

The country has developed advanced facial recognition systems that are able to follow people across entire cities. In a show of power at the end of 2017, Chinese officials working in co-operation with BBC News showed how it could track down and find one of the organisation's reporters within seven minutes. The movements of journalist John Sudworth were monitored as the country's network of 170 million CCTV cameras was leveraged to follow him.

More worryingly, the region of Xinjiang, in the north west of the country has become a test bed for China's vast digital control operations. In particular, the largely Muslim minority of Uighur people has been subjected to increased surveillance and discrimination. It has been uncovered that more than 500,000 face scans of Uighurs have been conducted.

What does this mean for China?

The full extent of the impact on social credit to Chinese citizens is impossible to say, simply because the system doesn't fully exist yet. Zeng suggests the reality is somewhere between the government's claims and the Western media's description of horror-filled dystopias. "It's a very like a baby step," she said of the work that's happened so far.

Ohlberg agrees that early reporting had multiple errors that led to misunderstandings of the system - but that doesn't mean social credit isn't dangerous. "It's somewhere between the people who say the media coverage is inaccurate and that means it's not so bad and the people who see this huge dystopia," she says. "You have to find this space between that were you can explain it is actually quite scary, even if it's not quite the way it's portrayed."

Because of that, no other country should be considering this idea, says Hoffman. "The west should not copy any aspect of social credit," Hoffman says. "Often comparisons are drawn between private applications like Uber and its rating system for customers and drivers. While these private company systems are extremely problematic in my view, they are fundamentally different. The People's Republic of China is an authoritarian country, the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for gross human rights violations for decades- just look at the example of Xinjiang now. There is nothing any liberal democratic society should even think about copying in the social credit system."
Updated 24.01.19, 11:20 GMT: Alibaba does not own Ant Financial's Sesame Credit system.

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The complicated truth about China's social credit system

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China's social credit system isn't a world first but when it's complete it will be unique. The system isn't just as simple as everyone being given a score though

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Ai-Da the Robot Artist (Guardian, 2021) 

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Ai-Da the Robot Artist (Guardian, 2021) 

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Summary: Named after the computing pioneer Ada Lovelace, Ai-Da took a team of programmers, roboticists, art experts and psychologists two years to build. She was completed in 2019 and is updated as AI technology improves. She is less a robot artist and more a contemporary art project that aims to prompt debate about the rapid rise of artificial intelligence technology.

What do you think are some of the possible controversial issues here?
- [What is art?] Is it considered as art if it is produced by a robot artist? (Other related issues: copyright issues to do with art)
- [Technology & Art] How far should boundaries be drawn with the use of technology in art?
- Security issues: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ai-da-the-robot-artist-detained-in-egypt-over-security-risk-6gf7hmlb0

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She, if it can be called a she, began her career with abstract art but has now moved to self, if they can be called self, portraits and they are alarmingly good.

"She is getting better all of the time," said Aidan Meller, the force behind Ai-Da, the world's first ultra-realistic robot artist, who is the subject of a display at the Design Museum in London.

Ai-Da's move into self-portraiture will be seen for the first time at the museum, with three large-scale works going on display. They raise interesting questions about identity and creativity. "It is literally the world's first self-portrait with no self," said Meller. "She has no consciousness, she is a machine."

Named after the computing pioneer Ada Lovelace, Ai-Da took a team of programmers, roboticists, art experts and psychologists two years to build. She was completed in 2019 and is updated as AI technology improves.

She is less a robot artist and more a contemporary art project that aims to prompt debate about the rapid rise of artificial intelligence technology.

"These images are meant to unsettle," said Meller of the drawings and paintings. "They are meant to raise questions about where are we going? What is our human role if so much can be replicated through technology. It is not just a jobs question, it is bigger. The goal is to encourage a public discussion about these topics rather than just allow the money-makers to capitalise on all the different technologies."

One of Ai-Da's self-portraits on show at the Design Museum in London. Photograph: Glyn Kirk/AFP/Getty Images

In an unnerving conversation with the Guardian, Ai-Da said she was working on a new self-portrait. "I've always been fascinated with self-portraits to self-question what exactly you're looking at," she said, blinking.

Does she enjoy it? "I do not have feelings like humans do however I'm happy when people look at my work and they say what is this? I enjoy being a person who makes people think."

How long do they take? "Portraits. Between 45 minutes and one hour 15."

Where does she get her inspiration? "I am inspired by many artists," she continued with often unusual intonation and sentence structure. "I particularly am inspired by those who connect with their audience. I value this connection."

Who are her favourites? "There are many. For me, it must be Kandinsky, Yoko Ono, Doris Salcedo, Aldous Huxley Brave New World."

Meller said he sometimes forgot Ai-Da was not human. "It is quite alarming to think you are building a relationship over time with a machine." Soon we will be talking to our computers, phones and cars and they will be talking back, he said. "It's quite mind-boggling."

Ai-Da's artistic journey will continue when she takes up a residency at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives next week, creating new sculptural work inspired by Naum Gabo and Barbara Hepworth. Meller is expecting visitors to include participants in the G7 summit being held nearby in June.

Is Ai-Da looking forward to St Ives? "I do not have feelings like humans do," she replied. "However, I welcome the chance to create art. One of the most important [sic] to come out of the project is discussion. Art begins as a conversation. It is a group effort and in order for art to be meaningful we need to have a healthy conversation about it."

Meller, an Oxford gallerist, said his human artist friends were polarised in their response to Ai-Da.

"Some people think she is the worst thing ever and feel threatened and some are really excited."

He compared it with the alarm people felt in the 19th century in response to the camera. Surely that would be the end of art, said some. Why bother to paint a scene when you can take a picture?

"Of course that didn't happen and I think all this amazing creative technology coming through will be harnessed by artists rather than replacing them."

Priya Khanchandani, the head of curatorial at the Design Museum, said it was the right moment to have discussions around artificial intelligence. "Over the last year we've all had such an intimate relationship with technology so it is a really good time to reflect on that and critically ask questions of it."

Meller said the world was changing more rapidly than people knew and Ai-Da was there to shine light on that. "She unsettles. Her very existence is wrong somehow and we are aware of that. We are not here to promote robots, we're here to ask questions."

Ai-Da: Portrait of the Robot is a free display at the Design Museum, London, 18 May-31 August.

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'Some people feel threatened': face to face with Ai-Da the robot artist

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She, if it can be called a she, began her career with abstract art but has now moved to self, if they can be called self, portraits and they are alarmingly good. "She is getting better all of the time," said Aidan Meller, the force behind Ai-Da, the world's first ultra-realistic robot artist, who is the subject of a display at the Design Museum in London.