Category: Globalization

Categories
Artificial Intelligence Education Globalization Reading Technology

Latest Read: Digital Empires

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology by Anu Bradford.

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology by Anu Bradford

Anu holds LLM and SJD from Harvard Law School, and both a Master of Laws and Licentiate from the University of Helsinki. Today Anu serves as Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. Today she is Director of the European Legal Studies Center at Columbia Law School and former assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

This is one of the important books everyone should be reading today in order to understand how the world is operating, the political and economic shifts underway and even how AI will influence the global economy in the coming century.

Anu is providing a very deep analysis of competing regulatory frameworks among the United States, China, and the European Union as they strive to govern technology and digital markets. Each is certainly shaping their efforts to support their global ambitions.

This is beyond business regulations and rather is contributing to their plans for dominating global digital economic market. And of course the digital market means AI.

Continue reading “Latest Read: Digital Empires”
Categories
Artificial Intelligence Education Globalization Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Atlas of AI

Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford. Kate has a PhD from the University of Sydney. Kate is a research professor of communication at USC, senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, and an honorary professor at the University of Sydney.

Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford

She is the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where she co-leads the international working group on the Foundations of Machine Learning. In 2021, she received the Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at the University of Melbourne.

Furthermore, Kate co-founded multiple interdisciplinary research groups including FATE at MSR, AI Now Institute at NYU, and Knowing Machines at USC. Kate has advised policy makers in the United Nations, the Federal Trade Commission, the European Parliament, the Australian Human Rights Commission, and the White House. Atlas of AI was named one of the best books on technology in 2021 by the Financial Times.

Kate is certainly delivering a powerful book addressing hidden costs of artificial intelligence. The list is rather lengthy, detailed and must not be overlooked. From natural resources, labor exploitation, failures of privacy in massive data collections, to undemocratic governance this is certainly eye opening. She is certainly revealing the cost of AI both upon the earth’s mining sites and factories, to snake oil salesmen exploiting workers in third world countries who ‘act as the ai’ in their products.

Continue reading “Latest Read: Atlas of AI”
Categories
Education Globalization Innovation Reading

Latest Read: A Brief History of Equality

A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty. Thomas is a French economist and Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics. In addition, he is a Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics.

A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty

Thomas previously taught as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a French economist, Thomas documents a global progress regarding equality by tapping into historical data.

This book is certainly addressing wealth redistribution, and is a continuation from his books Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and Capital and Ideology (2020).

However, the most interesting discoveries for Americans is how Thomas addresses colonialism. This obviously brings America’s slavery into a world view within Chapter 3: The Heritage of Slavery and Colonialism. In fact, we see that Europeans began their colonial rule around 1450–1500 with Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India. This was the initial Portuguese trading post on the coast of Africa. Thomas includes Columbus’s expedition to America. However this all ended in the 1960s with the French defeats in Indochina (Vietnam) and Northern Africa (Algeria). Yet, Thomas certainly brings South African apartheid into focus as these are not so long ago transformations.

Continue reading “Latest Read: A Brief History of Equality”
Categories
Education Globalization Innovation Reading Technology

Latest Read: How Markets Fail

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy. John is a staff writer at The New Yorker and teaches at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. This book was a 2010 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in General Nonfiction.

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

John has certainly written a very well structured book on economic markets divided into three parts: Utopian Economics, Reality-Based Economics, and The Great Crunch. This provides necessary insights to the very long history of economics. In addition, John shows how they have repeatedly failed from the 1700s to the the 2008 economic crisis.

I certainly enjoyed John sharing multiple points of historic economic failures via the insights of all economic experts at the time.

Utopian Economics

John places part one into a Utopian view. He reveals how attempts to link the macro and micro divisions of the economic model result in errors. At the same time it may not really apply across today’s COVID, gig economy.

Repeatedly the economic experts in the 1800s were very wrong. This view really cannot translate today across the globalized world. He also views the economic crisis of 2008 as a drastic market failure. The development and repair were excluded by the systems of the dominant economic paradigm of the past three decades.” John certainly illustrates how utopians believed in the infallible invisible hand of the market via Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill.

Continue reading “Latest Read: How Markets Fail”
Categories
Education Globalization Google Reading Technology

Latest Read: Invisible Women

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez. Caroline is an award-winning and bestselling writer and campaigner. She is a graduate from Oxford University.

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez

The role of a data gap is certainly male leaning. The most difficult task is addressing the data gap bias in cultural diversity across many countries.

What this reveals to me is a bit more complex requirement. The data gap must be aligned within the geographic region and time stamped cultural practices. This will provide much deeper insights.

The opening two chapters address Daily Life. Chapter One is addressing how plowing snow in Sweden is sexist. In America by comparison snow plowing priority is quite different.

The Public Works departments of cities and towns clear roads primarily to keep large traffic patterns clear of snow. The priority does change when winter weather advisories are issued.

When the midwest is hit with large snowfalls that cause delays in public transportation, obviously due to the lack of passable roads, the downstream effect can be delays in various organizations (arts, health, education) and ultimately a prioritization will be to clear roads so the delivery of the US mail can continue.

Continue reading “Latest Read: Invisible Women”