Daily Archives: December 16, 2020

Amid declining sales and evidence that smoking causes lung cancer, in the 1950s tobacco companies undertook PR campaigns to reinvent themselves as socially responsible and to shape public opinions. They also started funding research into the relationship between health and tobacco. Now, Big Tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google are following the same playbook to fund AI ethics research in academia, according to a recently published paper by University of Toronto Center for Ethics PhD student Mohamed Abdalla and Harvard Medical School student Moustafa Abdalla.

The coauthors conclude that effective solutions to the problem will need to come from institutional or governmental policy changes. The Abdalla brothers argue Big Tech companies arent just involved with, but are leading, ethics discussions in academic settings.

The truly damning evidence of Big Tobaccos behavior only came to light after years of litigation. However, the parallels between the public facing history of Big Tobaccos behavior and the current behavior of Big Tech should be a cause for concern, the paper reads. We believe that it is vital, particularly for universities and other institutions of higher learning, to discuss the appropriateness and the tradeoffs of accepting funding from Big Tech, and what limitations or conditions should be put in place.

An analysis of tenure-track research faculty at major AI research MIT, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and the University of Toronto included in the report found that nearly 60% with known funding sources have taken money from Big Tech.

Last week, Google fired Timnit Gebru, an AI ethics researcher, in what Google employees described as a a retaliatory fire following unprecedented research censorship. In an interview with VentureBeat earlier this week, Gebru said AI research conferences are heavily influenced by industry and said the world needs better options for AI research funding than corporate and military funding.

The Grey Hoodie project name is meant to hark back to Project Whitecoat, a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the impact of second-hand smoke that started in the 1980s. The Partnership on AI (PAI), the coauthors argue, takes the role of the Council for Tobacco Research, a group that supplied funding to academics studying the impact of smoking on human health. Created in 2016 by Big Tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google, PAI now has more than 100 participating organizations, including the ACLU and Amnesty International. By participating in meetings, research, and other initiatives, coauthors argue that nonprofit and human rights groups end up legitimizing Big Tech companies.

In a December 2019 account published in The Intercept, MIT PhD student Rodrigo Ochigame called AI ethics initiatives from Silicon Valley strategic lobbying efforts and quoted an MIT Media Lab colleague as saying Neither ACLU nor MIT nor any non-profit has any power in PAI.

Earlier this year the digital human rights organization Access Now resigned from the Partnership on AI, in part because the coalition has been ineffective in influencing the behavior of corporate partners. In an interview with VentureBeat responding to questions about ethics washing, PAI director Terah Lyons said it takes time to change the behavior of Big Tech companies.

In addition to funding academic research, Big Tech companies also fund AI research conferences. For example, coauthors say the Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) conference has never had a year without Big Tech funding, and NeurIPS has had at least two Big Tech sponsors since 2015. Apple, Amazon Science, Facebook AI Research, and Google Research are all among platinum sponsors of NeurIPS this year.

Abdalla and Abdalla suggest academic researchers consider splintering AI ethics into a separate field from computer science, akin to the way bioethics is separated from medicine and biology.

The Grey Hoodie Project follows analysis released this fall about the de-democratization of AI and a compute divide forming between Big Tech, elite universities, and the rest of the world.The Grey Hoodie Project paper was initially published this fall but was accepted for publication by the Resistance AI workshop, which takes place Friday as part of the NeurIPS AI research conference, the largest annual gathering of AI researchers in the world. In another first, this year, NeurIPS authors were required to state financial conflicts of interest and potential impact to society.

The topic of corporate influence over academic research came up at NeurIPS on Friday morning. During a panel conversation, Black in AI cofounder Rediet Abebe said she will refuse to take funding from Google, and that more senior faculty in academia need to speak up. Next year, Abebe will become the first Black woman assistant professor ever in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) department at UC Berkeley.

Maybe a single person can do a good job separating out funding sources from what theyre doing, but you have to admit that in aggregate theres going to be an influence. If a bunch of us are taking money from the same source, theres going to be a communal shift towards work that is serving that funding institution, she said.

The Resistance AI workshop at NeurIPS explores how AI has shifted power into the hands of governments and corporations and away from marginalized communities and how to shift power back to the people. Organizers count among them the founders of groups like Disability in AI and Queer in AI. Workshop organizers also include members of the AI community who describe themselves as abolitionists, advocates, ethicists, and AI policy experts, such as J Khadijah Abdurahman, who this week this week penned a piece about the moral collapse of AI ethics, and Marie-Therese Png, who coauthored a paper earlier this year about anticolonial AI and how to make AI free of the exploitative or oppressive technology.

A statement from Google Brain research associate Raphael Lopes and other conference organizers said the Resistance AI group was formed following a meetup at an AI conference this summer and is designed to include people marginalized in society today.

We were frustrated with the limitations of AI for good and how it could be coopted as a form of ethics-washing, organizers said. In some ways, we still have a long way to go: many of us are adjacent to big tech and academia, and we want to do better at engaging those who dont have this kind of institutional power.

Other work presented today as part of the event includes the following:

On Saturday another NeurIPS workshop will examine harm caused by AI and the broader impact of AI research on society.

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What Big Tech and Big Tobacco research funding have in common - VentureBeat

Of the Big Four tech companies, Google was the first to be targeted by the federal government this year, but that likely wasnt the end of the legal actions against the search giant.

The Justice Department lawsuit, filed in late October with 11 state attorneys general, centers on Googles conduct in the search market. Separate probes by the DOJ and states into Googles power in digital advertising markets continue, as does the Justice Departments review of Googles proposed acquisition of Fitbit Inc. FIT, +0.28%.

Their focus is the fact that 86% of internet searches are done through Google, a staggering number that gives the unit of Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, -0.22% GOOG, -0.27% nearly unilateral control over the distribution of information.

For more:Big Techs antitrust woes grow, but will it actually matter?

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta of the District of Columbia, the judge in the Justice Departments case, should also oversee class actions and other cases alleging antitrust violations against Google, according to a Nov. 5 court filing. Attorneys general in 11 states including Florida, Georgia and Texas have joined the DoJs case.

Google continues to stiff-arm the charges, offering its products superiority as a defense. We repeatedly have underscored that people go to Google search because they want to, not because they have to, Google Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said in a DealBook interview on Nov. 18. Google rose to the position that it has because it is a better product. We keep innovating and investing in such technology as machine learning.

Google Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker called the DOJs case deeply flawed in an Oct. 20 blog post, though the Silicon Valley powerhouse is employing a battalion of attorneys from prestigious law firms such as Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Morgan, Lewis & Bockius to represent it.

This indicates to Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, that the antitrust lawsuit will proceed slowly, and could erode. Not enough Democratic state AGs got behind the DOJs actions in the first place as in none, Chakravorti told MarketWatch. It was rushed through by [Attorney General William] Barr and an all-Republican cast of state AGs.

A majority of states investigating Google did not sign on to the Justice Departments suit, and could still bring charges.

See also: After charges against Google, road map to antitrust changes contains many potential routes

With House Democrats seeking a more comprehensive review of Big Techs powers, the antitrust lawsuit contains a risk that it would detract from that much more holistic approach to tackling the power of Big Tech beyond Google alone, Chakravorti said. They may want to push the Google lawsuit back into the annex.

Still, the evidence remains compelling. Yelp Inc. YELP, +1.74% has long held that Google favored its own products and services in search, often to the exclusion of Yelp and at the expense of consumers. Google also allegedly stole content from developers, such as restaurant reviews from Yelp.

In the risk factors section of its 10-Q filing on July 31, Yelp warned that search engines have made changes in the past to their ranking algorithms, methodologies and design layouts that have reduced the prominence of links to our platform and negatively impacted our traffic, and we expect they will continue to make such changes from time to time in the future.

Yelp claims Googles update to its search algorithm in the fourth quarter of 2019 may have harmed, and may be continuing to harm, its traffic. Similarly, Apple, Google or other marketplace operators may make changes to their marketplaces that make access to our products more difficult, according to the filing.

From a broad business perspective, this is going to take a long time, years to play out, just like Microsoft, Yelp Chief Financial Officer David Schwarzbach told MarketWatch. We welcome the scrutiny, but remain focused on our own business. They [Google] are part of the competitive landscape we face. It is an element of the competition we face.

U.S. regulators might also consider their legal path forward, following a series of antitrust charges by the European Union that resulted in nearly $10 billion in fines but little change in the competitive landscape. (In 2017, the EU fined Google $2.8 billion for abusing its market dominance by giving an illegal advantage in search results to Google Shopping.) The reason? European lawmakers largely left it to Google to fix the problems, antitrust lawyers and Google competitors warn.

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Google and antitrust: Big Tech's first target could face more legal action - MarketWatch

We have a saying in right-wing politics that there is a stupid party and an evil party in the United States; when they do something both stupid and evil, its called bipartisanship.

So when almost every state attorney general in the nation, Republicans and Democrats, come together for a single cause, count me as a skeptic.

Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller is leading a new lawsuit against Facebook, joined by 47 of his colleagues from around the country. They allege Facebook is harming consumers with its services that cost consumers $0.

The attorneys generals suit is coordinated with a separate Federal Trade Commission suit, both of which accuse the social media company of anti-competitive conduct.

Facebook, which has invested millions in data centers in Iowa, acquired the photo sharing app Instagram and the instant messaging service WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014, with approval from federal and foreign regulators.

The company grew Instagram from a tiny firm into a major social media service. It eliminated the subscription fee and enhanced privacy features on WhatsApp, creating a free and secure alternative to SMS messaging across the world.

Consumers liked that, as evidenced by the apps wild success. State and federal governments hate it. Theyre seeking to restrict Facebooks future business transactions and potentially break up the company.

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Facebooks market dominance means users have nowhere else to go for its services, and the company is able to make decisions that put profits over the interests of users, the Iowa Attorney Generals Office wrote in a statement announcing the lawsuit against Facebook.

Nowhere else to go? In fact, pretty much all of Facebooks services are offered by competing firms. The industry trend is for social media companies to duplicate each others features. We have Fleets, Snaps, Stories and TikToks, take your pic.

Millers lawsuit is the latest in a series of political and legal attacks against tech companies, including Facebook, Google and Amazon. In essence, the companies are accused of offering products that are too useful to consumers.

Google discovered that it could increase the number of clicks and its own profits by ranking ads to promote those with greater relevance, Republican attorneys general wrote in a federal lawsuit filed this year accusing Google of monopoly behavior.

Panic over Big Techs influence has grown out of control since 2016, when Democrats convinced themselves that a relatively small number of poorly crafted Russian memes unduly swung the election in Donald Trumps favor. Theyre joined by Republicans who think the liberal tech workforce is distorting public discourse to benefit the left. Evidence on both sides is tenuous.

It is a rare point of agreement among elite Republicans and Democrats: Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and the foreigners who made TikTok are bad guys who threaten our democracy, our economy and our very way of life. Politicians copied and pasted moral outrages of the past and updated a few details to fit the current narrative.

Big Techs denigrators are as diverse as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, Elizabeth Warren and Tulsi Gabbard. Proposed solutions range from perverting internet law to make social media companies liable for content users post, to outright busting the companies up.

Regardless of whether any of the court cases against tech companies are successful, theres a strong bipartisan consensus in Congress that something must be done. When Republicans and Democrats get together to do something for the sake of doing something, Americans often suffer from unintended but foreseeable consequences.

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The quest to bolster competition could well backfire. Facebook, for its part, welcomes a new regulatory regime to address the perceived issues.

We have called for new regulation to address some of them on an industrywide basis. ... Those hard challenges are best solved by updating the rules of the internet, Facebook general counsel Jennifer Newstead wrote in a blog post responding to the new lawsuit brough by Miller at his peers.

Those rules of the internet are certain to carry extra compliance costs that Facebook and other huge corporations are prepared to cover, with their legions of well compensated lawyers and lobbyists. Its small companies, Facebooks potential competitors, that would be stifled by complicated new regulations. The rules would enrich existing firms at the expense of consumer choice.

When Ted Cruz, Elizabeth Warren and Mark Zuckerberg all agree on something, Americans ought to be skeptical.

adam.sullivan@thegazette.com; (319) 339-3156

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Iowa is leading the two-party tizzy over Big Tech - The Gazette

Companies across multiple industries including the Big Tech will go shopping for competitors over the next five years as extended lockdowns amid Covid-19 and other pandemic-related dislocations have squeezed the profit margins of many businesses globally, leading to record levels of corporate defaults, a new report said on Monday.

The economic shock is poised to result in a wave of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as stronger companies acquire weakened rivals, technologies, and assets at bargain prices, said the report titled The great shakeout by leading global management consulting firm Kearney.

Over the next five years, the influence and size of companies and industries already wielding sizable market share are likely to grow as struggling competitors are eliminated during this great shakeout.

In the meantime, with more than $1.5 trillion in capital and a sea of financially weakened targets made available as a result of Covid-19, private equity groups have deployed their record levels of dry powder in the months following the pandemic, making more than 5,500 deals in the first nine months of 2020.

Stronger companies in sectors benefiting from the pandemic such as grocers, e-commerce and digital companies are likely to seek growth and additional capabilities by acquiring rivals or new technologies to improve business efficiency.

Between January and May 2020, tech giants such as Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft announced their highest number of acquisitions since 2016 a total of 19.

In the third quarter of 2020, both big technology companies and other players continued technology deals, with transactions surging to more than $200 billion levels not seen in two decades, the report noted.

Such acquisitions are enabling companies to position themselves in areas likely to grow during and after Covid-19, such as automation, fintech, digital services, and food delivery.

The activity is further spurred by both the availability of attractive valuations and rising fears of tighter M&A regulations.

For example, Facebook spent $5.7 billion on a 9.99 percent stake in Indias digital platform Jio, Microsoft acquired IoT and cybersecurity company CyberX, and European food delivery platform Just Eat Takeaway agreed to acquire the United States GrubHub for $7.3 billion.

Indeed, tech start-ups that are unable to compete with the giants will become more vulnerable to acquisitions as the latter seek to minimize competition, improve capabilities, and boost revenue streams, the report mentioned.

Obstacles to Covid-induced M&A activity are also starting to materialize, said the report, driven by a mix of protectionism and anti-monopoly sentiment.

In October, a congressional investigation into big tech companies recommended breaking up giants and stronger antitrust laws, just before the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google.

Regulatory scrutiny is intensifying elsewhere as well, with antitrust probes against tech giants, including Facebook, Apple, and Amazon underway in the EU, Australia, Brazil, and Canada, according to the Kearney report.

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Big Tech to shop for Covid-hit competitors in next 5 years: Report - Express Computer

The European Commission detailed two proposed pieces of legislation on Tuesday aimed at curbing the power of tech giants including Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL). The institution, which is responsible for introducing proposed legislation and implementing laws in the European Union, is aiming to reduce the influence of Big Tech and create a more favorable environment for smaller software companies.

The legislation has yet to be voted on by EU member states, but policy experts believe that the suggested changes could be rapidly adopted, according to a report published by CNBC. If enacted, the proposed rules would require mobile operating system owners, including Apple and Alphabet, to allow users to uninstall default software from their devices. The proposed legislation also includes a provision that would bar platform owners from giving priority to their own applications in search engines.

Image source: Getty Images.

If the new legislation is passed, companies would likely face stiff fines if found to be intentionally violating standards or be forced to break up their business units if they want to continue operations in the European Union.

Building an expanded ecosystem that ties products and services into each other has been a central component of many large tech companies' growth initiatives. However, this approach could become less viable depending on the regulatory climate.

Governments around the globe have recently been taking a tougher stance against large tech companies.Social media giants including Facebook and Twitter are notably under scrutiny in the U.S., and Chinese regulators have been putting pressure on domestic tech leaders including Alibaba and Tencent. Tech giants still have huge advantages compared to smaller competitors, but investors will have to weigh these strengths against mounting evidence that regulators will move to curb their power.

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New EU Regulations Could Spell Trouble for Apple, Alphabet, and Others - The Motley Fool

Written by Dana Sanchez

Dec 15, 2020

Bitcoin has been surging for a while along with traditional markets, removing any doubt that the No. one digital currency and the overall crypto market have some correlation with the stock market.

In March 2020, when the Nasdaq, Dow Jonesand S&P 500 fellto their one-year lows, bitcoin crashed to $3,800 its one-year low.

When the Federal Reserve announced unlimited money printing to sustain the market, the new money supply and its expectations became the most important factor for both the stock and crypto markets which tend to rise when liquidity is made freely available, Blockchain News reported.

Since then, both the stock and the crypto markets started a bull run. The Nasdaq, Dow Jonesand S&P 500 reached record highs, as did ethereum and bitcoin, which reached $19,920.53 according to data-provider Coindesk. As of this writing, bitcoin is trading at $19,374.

Here are five things to know about bitcoins risky correlation with big tech, risk assets and the stock market.

Being the de facto world currency, the U.S. dollar is the value benchmark for everything else including assets and other fiat currencies, aka U.S. dollar colonization. Although bitcoin and other crypto can function like currencies such as payments and store of value, the market cap of cryptocurrencies is small compared to traditional finance, and most financial activities are based on fiat money, Blockchain News reported.

In other words, the financial inclusion of cryptocurrencies is not enough. If bitcoin and other crypto replace more traditional financial functions, that may reduce the role of the U.S. dollar and other fiat money, and the relationships between bitcoin and other fiat money will change.

If bitcoin is a safe haven, why has it been tanking when the going gets rough?

The positive correlation between bitcoin and the benchmark S&P 500 stock index means that bitcoins price movements are consistent with those in equity markets, Bloomberg reported. When President Donald Trump tested positive for coronavirus in early October, the stock market dropped but bitcoin dropped even further. Gold witnessed a small rally.

The S&P 500 lost 6 percent from its September high, while bitcoin was down about 15 percent since from its mid-August peak. The movement was counter to the often-touted narrative that bitcoin is a haven.

Usually, a safe haven is something of value most famously, gold that grows during tough times such as recessions. Since its launch, bitcoin has been defined as a safe haven.

Thats not necessarily true. Bitcoin isnt exactly a safe haven asset yet but its monetary policy and its long-term trajectory shows that its working its way there, according to a post by Norwegian Block Exchange (NBE), a cryptocurrency exchange.

Crypto investors say bitcoin is digital gold and should hold a similar place to gold as a reliable fallback in times of crisis. So why did bitcoin fall when times were tough?

Some analysts argue that while bitcoin is highly correlated with traditional equities, it will not be the case forever.

Institutional investors on Wall Street are increasingly moving into and crypto. Bitcoins reputation as digital gold got a boost earlier this year when investor Paul Tudor Jones said he was buying it as a hedge against inflation that he sees coming as a result of Federal Reserve and central bank money-printing, Forbes reported.

Payments companies PayPal and Square are both betting on bitcoin.

Its shortsighted to think that bitcoin cant be a safe haven because it fell when the U.S. stock marketfell in March 2020, NBE reported. Thats because the digital coin has only been around since 2009. Covid-19 is the first major test of the theory that its digital gold and consequently, a better safe haven. Until covid is over and global markets have truly rebounded, it wont be reasonable to conclude what served as a safe haven during these times.

Technology stocks including Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook surged during the coronavirus pandemic. Bitcoin outperformed them all including Amazons massive 2020 stock price rally and Nasdaqs increase.

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 73: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin makes the case for why this is a multi-factor rebellion vs. just protests about George Floyd. He discusses the Democratic Partys sneaky relationship with the police in cities and states under Dem control, and why Joe Biden is a cop and the Steve Jobs of mass incarceration.

London-based digital asset management firm CoinShares recommended investors allocate 4 percent of their portfolios to bitcoin, arguing that in its growth phase, it behaves like a tech stock, Forbes reported in August.

As a disruptive technology, bitcoins risk profile is rather similar to that of a technology stock: if it reaches its potential, the value could be immense, but at the same time, there is a chance it fails entirely, leaving the value of bitcoins close to zero, wrote CoinShares research strategist James Butterfill.

Gold is still the leading safe-haven asset by a mile with the top cryptocurrency acting as a risk asset, Cryptobriefing reported. The value proposition of bitcoin is that its asuperior, digitalversion of gold. This thesis does hold merit, but the behavior of market participants doesnt add up. Bitcoins place as a safe haven asset beenquestioned over and over. Each time, the evidence says the top digital asset is a risk-asset.

Investors dont buy BTC en masse during times of economic uncertainty, Ashwath Balakrishnan wrote for Cryptobriefing. Since the global market crash of March 2020, bitcoin followed equities closely and cemented its position as a better risk-adjusted play on a post-covid recovery. It does have hedging properties but not the kind that makes it an economic hedge yet.

Todays environment is plagued by economic uncertainty, and investors seem to believe this isnt an ideal situation for bitcoin, Balakrishnan wrote. Theres no doubt that the genesis cryptocurrency has a sound thesis rooted in a changing economic system, but the broader market is yet to realize this. Gold is still the foremost safe haven asset without a shadow of a doubt and BTC is a risk-on asset.

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5 Things To Know About Bitcoins Risky Correlation With Big Tech, Risk Assets And The Stock Market - Moguldom