Nobody Cares About the (Digital) Environment, Andrew Burt, Dan Geer

Description

Our data cannot be protected at scale. Algorithmic systems have long made decisions that their programmers will never understand. It is no longer rare to encounter failures that cannot be addressed even after they are detected—something breaks, in other words, but no one can fix it. Indeed, for as long as the digital world has existed it has been defined by unmitigable risks. And yet more and more software and AI systems are adopted every day. Which leads us to this fundamental question: Why do we so easily and so collectively ignore the risks that plague our digital environment?

In this talk, we will explain why software systems and the data they rely upon have been marked by deep and systemic risk since their earliest days—and with scant progress. We will conclude by outlining a new form of digital environmentalism that we believe will help to solve our most pressing digital problems

Andrew Burt is co-founder and managing partner of Luminos.Law, a boutique law firm focused on artificial intelligence and analytics, as well as a visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. Previously, he served as chief legal officer at Immuta and as special advisor for policy to the head of the FBI Cyber Division. He holds a JD from Yale Law School

Dan Geer is a security researcher with a quantitative bent. He is an electrical engineer (MIT), a statistician (Harvard), and someone who thinks truth is best achieved by adversarial procedures (school of hard knocks). He serves as a senior fellow at In-QTel. His collected writings can be found at http://geer.tinho.net/pubs.

 

Sponsoring Organization(s)

ISP