“There are things that we can use AI for that will really benefit people, but there are lots of ways that AI can harm people and perpetuate inequalities and discrimination that we’ve seen for our entire history,” said Lisa Rice, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance.
While key federal regulators have said decades-old anti-discrimination laws and other protections can be used to police some aspects of artificial intelligence, Congress has struggled to advance proposals for new licensing and liability systems for AI models and requirements focused on transparency and kids’ safety.
“The average layperson out there doesn’t know what are the boundaries of this technology?” said Apostol Vassilev, a research team supervisor focusing on AI at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “What are the possible avenues for failure and how these failures may actually affect your life?”
Here’s how AI is already affecting …
How people get a job…
AI has already influenced hiring, particularly at employers using a video interview tool.
Hiring technology these days isn’t just screening for keywords on resumes — it’s using powerful language processing tools to analyze candidates’ answers to written and video interview questions, said Lindsey Zuloaga, chief data scientist at HireVue, an AI-driven human resources company known for its video interviewing tools.
There may come a point when human interviewers will become obsolete for some types of jobs, especially in high turnover industries like fast food, Zuloaga said.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the small agency tasked with enforcing workplace civil rights, is closely monitoring developments in the technology. It has issued guidance clarifying that anti-discrimination laws still apply — and employers can still be held liable for violations — even when AIs assist in decision making. It hasn’t put out new regulations, however.
New York last year implemented a mandate of transparency and annual audits for potential bias in automated hiring decisions, though the shape of those reviews is still being carved out.
Read the rest of this article at: Politico
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Norval Morrisseau was certain. “I did not paint the attached 23 acrylics on canvas,” he wrote in a typed letter in 2001 to his Toronto gallery representative, who had sent him color photocopies of works that had recently sold at an unrelated auction.
Morrisseau, then in his late 60s and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was the most important artist in the modern history of Canada’s Indigenous peoples—the “Picasso of the North.” He had single-handedly invented the Woodlands school of art, which fused European and Indigenous traditions to create striking, vibrant images featuring thick black lines and colorful interiors of humans, animals and plants, as though they had been X-rayed and their insides were visible and filled with unusual patterns and shapes. He was one of the first Indigenous painters to garner national attention and the first to have a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. “Few exhibits in Canadian art history have touched off a greater immediate stir,” swooned the Canadian edition of Time magazine after Morrisseau’s sold-out 1962 debut exhibition in Toronto.
By 2001, Morrisseau paintings routinely fetched thousands of dollars on the market. The works he now denied having painted were no exception. The auctioneer had advertised them as being from Morrisseau’s hand and claimed to a reporter writing about the dispute that, though he had obtained the paintings from an obscure seller, he had no reason to doubt their authenticity—he had already sold 800 of them without a single buyer’s complaint.
Morrisseau, though justifiably incensed, wasn’t surprised that imitations of his work were being sold as authentic on the open market. As early as 1991, the Toronto Star reported the artist was complaining about being “ripped off” by fraudsters. But for years Canadian law enforcement did little to investigate the artist’s claims that forgers were imitating his work. Eventually, in the face of this inaction, Morrisseau’s lawyers advised him to notify galleries and auctioneers that they were selling fakes and warn them that they could be the subject of a court injunction, civil action or criminal complaint. Still the sales went on.
Read the rest of this article at: Smithsonian Magazine
Readers of Fredric Jameson’s 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” will recall that he devotes a number of vivid pages to the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. The hotel, Jameson observes, has no clear entrances; it has elevators that shoot up through the ceiling, a reflective facade so you can’t see in, a color-coded lobby where you can’t get your bearings, and shops on different levels that are impossible to find your way back to a second time. The visitor will feel bewildered. The name of this bewilderment, Jameson says, is postmodernism. Postmodernism “has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.” The hotel is a symbol or analogue of “the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves as individual subjects.”
Readers of Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, a tribute to and update of Jameson’s period-defining essay, are offered a similar performance of allegorical description, this time taking off from the opening credits of the Safdie brothers’ 2019 film Uncut Gems. “Zero in on an Ethiopian miner’s hand holding a beige rock, an implausible neon lagoon glinting at its center, and delve deeper into the glittering facets, blur the tight focus, transgress the flat surface, seep into a volume of cloudy color, swerve to a quick black and gush of red.” The shot goes on, showing us darkness, then letters assembling into the film’s title, which gives way to pearls and polyps, then tissues and veins, before ending on a computer screen and a voice over: “Now reaching the right side of the colon.” Welcome to “colonoscopy cinematography,” a novel technique for producing immediacy.
Read the rest of this article at: The Baffler
“Paul Giamatti is our real-life Brad Pitt,” declares actress Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Giamatti’s Oscar-nominated co-star from “The Holdovers.” And she’s not joking. After all, as Randolph points out, “We can’t all be Brad Pitt, and I mean that in the most positive way.” The actor argues that Giamatti, in roles ranging from Revolutionary War heroes and Depression era boxing coaches to, in “The Holdovers,” a cranky New England boarding schoolteacher, has displayed a talent for always seeming natural on screen. Just as Pitt blazes on screen, Giamatti draws audiences in.
“Paul is a man of a certain age that men can relate to,” Randolph says. “That’s why I think Paul is our real-life Brad Pitt — [he’s] a champion of reality. What is real? An everyday man.”
The unassuming actor, who normally lives a paparazzi free existence in Brooklyn, eschewed a glitzy celebratory bash following his Golden Globe triumph in Alexander Payne’s poignant dramedy. Instead, he opted for the simple pleasures of an In-n-Out Burger in Los Angeles — and a photo of him dining there in his tux, with his trophy and burgers on the table, went viral on social media. “I’m on the edge of my seat for that endorsement deal,” he quips. “That’s when things are really going to explode.”
Weeks later, the 56-year-old Giamatti received his first lead actor Oscar nomination. He chose to stay up late in Brooklyn the night before, preferring the embrace of sleep over the suspense of the Academy’s early morning reveal “I would rather be asleep and not want to know,” he muses. “I figured I’d hear from people no matter what.”
The sting of Oscar nomination mornings past, when anticipation was met with silence, is not foreign to Giamatti. In 2004, “Sideways” — a hilarious odyssey of a failed writer’s vinous escapades directed by Payne — garnered critical acclaim, yet Giamatti’s tour-de-force performance was conspicuously absent from the roll call of lead actor nominees. The film scored a trophy for adapted screenplay and was nominated for best picture, while Giamatti’s co-stars Thomas Haden Church and Virginia Madsen were also recognized by Academy voters.
“The harder thing for me to deal with was other people’s disappointment,” Giamatti says now. “My agents were heartbroken, and their sorrow weighed heavily on me. I grapple with disappointing people all the time. It’s a thing that I’ve tried to grow out of. Here’s the thing: I never expected it. I didn’t think I deserved it either.”
It didn’t take him long to receive his first Oscar nomination after the “Sideways” snub — that came a year later, for his supporting turn in “Cinderella Man” — but it ended up being nearly two decades, and countless acclaimed performances, before his name was called out as a lead actor nominee for an Academy Award. Besides Giamatti, the Focus Features’ film is nominated for best picture, supporting actress (Randolph), original screenplay (David Hemingson) and editing (Kevin Tent).
Read the rest of this article at: Variety
I am standing on the sand at Scheveningen, The Hague’s most famous beach resort, in the act of niksen, the Dutch term for doing absolutely nothing. I try not to think about whether I am really doing nothing if I am standing on a beach. Maybe I should be sitting down? But then I would be sitting down. How do you niksen properly? Being effortlessly aimless next to me is Olga Mecking, the author of Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing. In the three years since the book was published, she has become the Netherlands’ go-to authority on doing sod all. I suddenly remember there is a pancake house back on the promenade. Does eating pancakes count as doing nothing, or is it too much like doing something? Maybe I am not cut out for niksen.
It’s very common, says Mecking, to struggle to define niksen. “The definition I use in the book is: to do nothing, without a purpose. Not watching a movie, not scrolling social media, not reading emails. We always have in mind some kind of outcome. When we prepare meals, we think, ‘This meal will help me lose weight or will make me healthier.’ If we go for a walk, it has to be part of our 10,000 steps. So we lose that fun of just eating or just walking. So it’s about letting go of the outcome.”
I like this. I am ready to let go of the outcome. “It wasn’t easy to find a definition,” she adds. “I found any strict definition would make people feel guilty. So many people tell me they feel guilty because they can’t succeed in doing nothing.” And here she has defined exactly why there is a global market for her book.
A journalist and parenting blogger (she has three children), Mecking is married to a German and lives in The Hague. Although she speaks Dutch fluently, she is Polish. She first encountered the expression niksen in a free supermarket magazine in 2018. She was intrigued that there was no similar verb in any other language she knew. She pitched niksen to the New York Times. When the article – The Case for Doing Nothing – was published in 2019, it went viral. Within weeks, she had a publishing deal. The book, designed to sit alongside books on hygge (the Danish art of cosiness) and fika (the Swedish art of the coffee break), came out just as the Netherlands went into its first hard lockdown in late 2020. A typical Amazon review from that year? “Perfect reading if you are struggling with pandemic-related stress.”
Read the rest of this article at: The Guardian