This week in The Guardian: An explanation of AI targeting technology & defense of AI regulation
Our human rights are under threat by Big Tech, AI, and Venture Capital
Read the article here
One day I woke up to realize the AI tech I used to market was likely being used to police the free speech of students, to deport and disappear people, and to kill journalists. I realized that everything I had been told about the benefits and dangers of AI was based on hype, deception, and a willful blindness to its effects on vulnerable people around the world.
AI is ALREADY being used to kill and to take away people's civil rights every day. People like Neri Alvarado, a baker who was deported to CECOT for an autism awareness tattoo — you can watch my interview on the subject of his deportation for France24 — or the journalists and paramedics killed over the past few days at Nasser Hospital in Gaza, where they were recovering the bodies of victims when executed by "double tap" precision strikes.
I also realized that many of my representatives, like William Lindstedt, Michael Carter, Judy Amabile, Lisa Frizell were working tirelessly to dismantle the first-in-the nation consumer protections from AI discrimination, propped up by millions of dollars of lobbying and caving into pressure by Governor Jared Polis and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, who in turn caved into pressure from venture capital.
What could an individual do when faced with these realizations? I decided to speak out. After reading the groundbreaking paper by Heidy Khlaaf, Sarah Myers West, and Meredith Whittaker called Mind the Gap: Foundation Models and the Covert Proliferation of Military Intelligence, Surveillance, and Targeting — everything clicked: while we have spent years worried about singularity and labor replacement, a more dangerous AI-born threat is leading to perverse violations of human rights around the world today.
It was the very technology which they described, ISTAR, which I was in charge of illustrating while working for Palantir Technologies, and which I have decided to explain for The Guardian this weekend in my defense of Colorado's AI Sunshine Act, for which I testified, and which was dismantled at the State Senate in favor of a five month delay of Colorado’s AI regulations.
Colorado has a chance to make history and lead the nation by taking a step in the right direction — but the next five months will determine whether politicians pick the side of the people, or succumb to the hundreds of millions of dollars Big Tech is accumulating to kill state regulations.
