"Coded bias" by Shalini Kantayya. Source: FIFDH.

🌐 Decoding Coded Bias for a more equitable artificial intelligence. During her first semester at MIT, researcher Joy Buolamwini got a computer-vision software that did not recognise her face until she put on a white mask. This was the beginning of her quest against biases in technology, and the story of a documentary, Coded Bias, presented at the Geneva International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH) in March.

🎥 Films for the scientific imagination. Way Beyond and The Great Void, two of the films being featured at this year's Visions du Réel documentary film festival in Nyon, seem to answer each other. The first one documents colossal plans to build a new 100km particle accelerator, dubbed the Future Circular Collider (FCC) at CERN. The second observes a world devoid of any sign of life. Science fiction and documentary are highly compatible.

🚀 The Ingenuity helicopter has taken up its challenge and flown to Mars. They did it: for the first time, an aircraft has made a controlled flight on a planet other than our own. Ingenuity, the helicopter carried by the Mars 2020 mission's Perseverance rover, will go down in the history of both space exploration and aeronautics.

'Fashion and Sustainability: Look Good, Feel Good, Do Good' – Models parade sustainable clothing representing different regions of the world during the fashion showcase. PHOTO:UN Photo/Manuel Elias.

Celebrating the creative economy in 2021. 21 April is World Creativity and Innovation Day. An opportunity to celebrate the creative economy and to raise the awareness of the role of creativity and innovation in all aspects of human development.

© Modern War Institute

The risk of heading to a third ‘winter’ for Artificial Intelligence (AI). A ‘winter’, talking so, is a massive decrease in financial investments: that is the hypothesis discussed in a fascinating article of Foreign Affairs (FA, see below). Today, a lot of promises go along with developments in that field. So much that recently, one leading researcher in AI and machine learning, Michael I. Jordan, had to stress again that “AI systems are nowhere near advanced enough to replace humans in many tasks involving reasoning, real-world knowledge, and social interaction.”

Still, many countries, starting with the US, are investing gigantus amounts of money in AI research and systems developed by private companies, and this especially in the military sector. But “once again, it risks sliding backward as a result of a destructive ‘hype cycle’ in which overpromising conspires with inevitable setbacks to undermine the long-term success of a transformative new technology”, writes FA. In other words: seeing other countries like China and Russia also investing heavily in AI, the US national security services do the same without being ready, on many fronts, to include AI technologies in their daily business on the very long term! Which could finally lead to the abandonment of those technologies…

Coincidentally, last week, the European Commission announced it would ban certain uses of "high-risk" artificial intelligence systems altogether – think creepy facial recognition tech and many, many Black Mirror episodes, as Politico puts it.

All in all, both news put a dark light on a technology that should deserve something else than a third winter, to quote Michael I. Jordan: “While the science-fiction discussions about AI and super-intelligence are fun, they are a distraction. There’s not been enough focus on the real problem, which is building planetary-scale machine learning-based systems that actually work, deliver value to humans, and do not amplify inequities.”

- Olivier Dessibourg

The perils of overhyping artificial intelligence. For AI to succeed, it first must be able to fail.

Quantum computers are revealing an unexpected new theory of reality. A powerful new idea about how the laws of physics work.

Using brain interfaces to learn about learning. The internal state of the brain is often a mystery – including to ourselves – but new neural interfaces are making it easier for scientists to observe the mind in action.

Robots are animals, not humans. Humans have worked alongside animals for centuries. So why are we so obsessed with comparing robots to ourselves?

With ‘smoke ring’ technology, fusion start-up marks steady progress. A private company announced that its latest device can sustain high temperatures for long reaction times.

This selection is proposed by the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator GESDA, working on anticipating cutting-edge science and technological advances to develop innovative and inclusive solutions for the benefit of the planet and its inhabitants.

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