When researchers at University of Washington pulled together a clip of a faked speech by President Obama using video segments of the President’s earlier speeches run through artificial intelligence, we watched with a queasy feeling. The combination wasn’t perfect – we could still see some seams and stitches […]
Long ago, when I worked as a lawyer at a large bank, we were generally able to rely on new state consumer protection laws being pre-empted by Federal financial regulations. This was a positive thing, because our bank, like many other big national consumer-facing companies, would usually wrap […]
I’ve been thinking back to simpler times when data was carried on paper and it required physical access to break into somebody’s files. Outside the hospital and maybe the bank there were few obligations for caring for this information hoard and nobody’s business spent much money to do […]
For years we have been treated to the impassioned entreaties of cryptohippies, hardcore libertarians, and straight-up conmen for the rest of us to understand that both blockchain and Bitcoin have “changed everything” and are driving us toward a destiny of money freed from government interference and life choices […]
Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Similarly, everybody seems to despise the entire business of data brokerage – third parties who collect information about us second-hand and third-hand, but who do not actually have a relationship with the data subjects whose information is […]
I expected this post would turn out differently. I had intended to commend the European Court of Justice for placing sensible limits on the extraterritorial enforcement of the EU’s Right to be Forgotten. They did, albeit in a limited way,[1] and it was a good decision. There. I […]
For more than a decade I have been warning about the vulnerability of brainspray – the brain signals that can be captured from outside your head. In 2008, this article by Jeffery Goldberg demonstrated that an fMRI machine could easily interpret how a person felt about stimuli provided […]
Given trends toward digitization and remote transaction, senior security professionals have long expected that biometric identification would be the clear future of security, obviating need for account codes and social security numbers. Safely transferring and storing a retinal scan or voice print makes more sense than memorized numbers […]
New York City Mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Bill de Blasio is promoting a novel idea. He wants to create a new federal agency to oversee the transition from human jobs to tasks managed by machine automation. This proposal is: Good Politics Good Policy Neither Both? I would […]
One of the biggest legal problems protecting AI users in the coming years will be accountability – dealing with the opacity of the black box and explaining decisions made by machine thinking. Understanding the logic behind an AI finding is not an issue where AI is assisting in […]
