Guterres should start close to home. He no longer needs to curry favor for another mandate; so there is no excuse to reserve posts and clear senior appointments with member states.

square the circle regarding quality, autonomy and representation.

consider buyouts to cut deadwood and permit new and younger staff.

are appalled with internal politics and the quotas that trump competence and shamelessly justify favoritism

Such no-nonsense personalities and approaches are essential at senior and junior levels to make meaningful the ideal of an autonomous and competent international civil service

UNDP’s quasi-independent Human Development Report

To realize the SDGs’ potential as universal aspirations, the UN system’s value-added should be hard-hitting monitoring,

UN’s comparative advantage as ideamonger.

the UN’s most significant value-added lies in policy ideas, normative innovations and standards.

Ideational output about development was largely unanticipated in 1945

UN’s most distinctive contributions come as a purveyor of ideas, as a norm- and standard-setter. (Truth in packaging: I was one of the directors.)

Except for UN Women’s fusion from four smaller units, the UN system has never shuttered major entities.

Specialized agencies are independently funded and managed, answering to their own governors. Even UN special funds and programs are autonomous.

Successive secretaries-general have not reigned in the so-called system; fragmentation has metastasized.

Dass es diesen Vorschlag überhaupt gibt, ist ein Riesenfortschritt.

Festgelegte Risikoklassen hauen oft nicht hin, weil künstliche Intelligenz flexibel einsetzbar ist.

Besonders offensichtlich wird die Schwierigkeit einer guten Kategorisierung beim Verbot von Manipulation

ähnliche Plattformen

Wir sind abhängig von bestimmten Infrastrukturbedingungen im Netz

Strukturprobleme der Digitalisierung

dark patterns

to achieve a sustainable peace with the digital world.

There's no manuals, there's no best practices,” Rauchbauer says. “You have to invent everything on the go and have to think it out yourself.” In the face of rapidly expanding tech empires, governments must use every tool at their disposal to contend with them.

Microsoft, for example, opened offices to the United Nations and the European Union in 2020, creating space for diplomatic, not just commercial, engagements

“This idea that you're a diplomat that is not geographically located and focused ... is a challenge for foreign ministries. And the antibodies in foreign ministries against things that don't look like they're from these categories are strong.”

"The freight train is coming ... so it’s not the IT office that needs to deal with technology; it’s mainstream foreign and security policy. Too few countries get that."

net states

They may recognize that Big Tech has country-like powers, but they can’t seem to figure out how to deal with their very un-country-like structures.

The firing of top Google AI ethics researchers has created a significant backlash

combination of self-interest and technological advantage

Firstly, Google happens to have in abundance the two resources that have powered AI’s ascendance in recent years: abundant computing power and data. Secondly, the company has stated time and time again that AI is crucial to future profitability.

finding funding in academia would always force researchers to turn to potentially compromising sources.

noted that interference in research was the price of working in industry labs

a 2018 paper called Gender Shades by researcher Joy Buolamwini — a paper now recognized as a landmark critique of gender and racial bias in facial recognition.

Networks in Tunisia and Mongolia were similarly left uninvestigated, despite elections in Tunisia and a constitutional crisis in Mongolia.

A Bolivian network of fake accounts supporting a presidential candidate in the run-up to the nation’s disputed October 2019 general election was wholly ignored;

Nearly all of them are Pages posing as people – 294 of the 301. Half of the Pages were less than one-month old when they posted here; all of the Pages were less than a year old.

The loophole has remained open due to a lack of enforcement, and it appears that it is currently being used by the ruling party of Azerbaijan to leave millions of harassing comments on the Facebook Pages of independent news outlets and Azerbaijani opposition politicians.

“Page abuse”,

the digital equivalent of bussing in a fake crowd for a speech.

In addition to shaping public perception of a political leader’s popularity, fake engagement can affect Facebook’s all-important news feed algorithm.

One way to do this is by creating fake “engagement” – likes, comments, shares and reactions – using inauthentic or compromised Facebook accounts

acted quickly

The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to prioritize addressing abuses that attract media attention or affect the US and other wealthy countries

Facebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents despite being alerted to evidence of the wrongdoing.

He expressed that after 50 phone interviews, nobody demonstrated they could think critically about how to calculate the consequences of actions 20 or so steps down the line, or understand the motivations behind someone’s actions, such as an individual eBay seller, in a largely unregulated environment. But given my training, I could do that easily!

In tech culture, senior leadership is going to follow their passions like any other human, but they have a lot more power, and therefore more ability, to achieve the objects of their desire.

I’ve also been called “difficult” for having even the gentlest of opinions and was basically told that having any feedback at all meant that I didn’t trust my manager and that this made me a problem.

work for four years and then take a year off because you’re so tired.

But you do what you need to do because the pay is so good, or because you believe you’re making a difference, or because you just want to keep your job.

you notice that people who do speak up and ask critical questions end up getting humiliated and fired. Being on board is an unspoken requirement of employment.

It’s relentless. I never had a real vacation where I could just relax.

because if you don’t have the stamina to be working nonstop, full time as overtime, you’re not going to cut it.

So, you’re always in a sprint, trying to do more with less.

hareholders expect revenue growth from 30% to 50% year after year. 20 years ago, that would have been phenomenal. Now, it’s the norm.

They figure the public outcry will go away. They bring in new management to bulletproof themselves against further criticism. They do the opposite of becoming self-aware and contrite.

At this point in a company, you only really only survive if you keep your head down, don’t raise concerns to anyone, and let concerns drop when you hear them, even if they’re constructively posed.

If I understand you correctly, the scrutiny of Big Tech hasn’t motivated companies to find their moral compasses or adopt precautionary policies to minimize future harms at scale. Instead, it’s allowed extremely powerful entities to adopt a victimized mentality filled with grievances.

once gave a talk for a major company and was asked to start off by voicing whatever reservations I might have had. It was a brilliant move. The goal was to make me feel heard without actually caring about my concerns. The technique uses catharsis to get people to lower their guard.

A culture of obsession with growth metrics makes it tempting to ignore the ecosystem.