This week the European Commission (EC) announced that it is fining Google $2.7 billion for anti-competitive tactics in the company’s iconic search product. In this post I’ll unpack what’s going on here. I have some background on this topic. In 2011-12, when I was Chief Technologist at the FTC, the agency did a big investigation […]
Lessons of 2016 for U.S. Election Security
June 19, 2017 by
The 2016 election was one of the most eventful in U.S. history. We will be debating its consequences for a long time. For those of us who pay attention to the security and reliability of elections, the 2016 election teaches some important lessons. I’ll review some of them in this post. First, though, let’s review […]
What does it mean to ask for an “explainable” algorithm?
May 31, 2017 by
One of the standard critiques of using algorithms for decision-making about people, and especially for consequential decisions about access to housing, credit, education, and so on, is that the algorithms don’t provide an “explanation” for their results or the results aren’t “interpretable.” This is a serious issue, but discussions of it are often frustrating. The reason, […]
Multiple Intelligences, and Superintelligence
May 4, 2017 by
Superintelligent machines have long been a trope in science fiction. Recent advances in AI have made them a topic for nonfiction debate, and even planning. And that makes sense. Although the Singularity is not imminent–you can go ahead and buy that economy-size container of yogurt–it seems to me almost certain that machine intelligence will surpass ours eventually, and quite […]
Questions for the FBI on Encryption Mandates
March 29, 2017 by
I wrote on Monday about how to analyze a proposal to mandate access to encrypted data. FBI Director James Comey, at the University of Texas last week, talked about encryption policy and his hope that some kind of exceptional access for law enforcement will become available. (Here’s a video.) Let’s look at what Director Comey […]
