Facing a Changing Industry, AI Activists Rethink Their Strategy

In the spring of 2018, thousands of Google employees pressured the company into dropping a major artificial intelligence contract with the Pentagon. The tech giant even pledged to not use its AI for weapons or certain surveillance systems in the future. The victory, which came amid a wave of unprecedented employee-led protests, helped inspire a new generation of tech activists in Silicon Valley. But seven years later, the legacy of that moment is more complicated. Google recently revised its AI ethics principles to allow some of the use cases it previously banned, and companies across the industry are releasing powerful new AI tools at breakneck speed. On Tuesday, the AI Now Institute, a think tank that studies the social implications of artificial intelligence, published a sweeping report on the current AI landscape, detailing the way power is becoming concentrated in a handful of dominant companies that have shaped narratives about the technology to their own advantage. The authors ... Read full article.