Current and Near-Term AI as a Potential Existential Risk Factor

There is a substantial and ever-growing corpus of evidence and literature exploring the impacts of Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies on society, politics, and humanity as a whole. A separate, parallel body of work has explored existential risks to humanity, including but not limited to that stemming from unaligned Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). In this paper, we problematise the notion that current and near-term artificial intelligence technologies have the potential to contribute to existential risk by acting as intermediate risk factors, and that this potential is not limited to the unaligned AGI scenario. We propose the hypothesis that certain already-documented effects of AI can act as existential risk factors, magnifying the likelihood of previously identified sources of existential risk. Moreover, future developments in the coming decade hold the potential to significantly exacerbate these risk factors, even in the absence of artificial general intelligence. Our main contribution is a (non-exhaustive) exposition of potential AI risk factors and the causal relationships between them, focusing on how AI can affect power dynamics and information security. This exposition demonstrates that there exist causal pathways from AI systems to existential risks that do not presuppose hypothetical future AI capabilities

Preface

These proceedings contain the papers of the Third International Workshop on Recent Trends in News Informa-tion Retrieval (NewsIR\u201919) held in conjunction with the ACM SIGIR 2019 conference in Paris, France, on the25thof July 2019. Ten full papers and two short papers (one position paper and one demo paper) were selectedby the programme committee from a total of 21 submissions. Each submitted paper was reviewed by at leastthree members of an international programme committee. In addition to the selected papers, the workshopfeatures one keynote and one invited talk. The Keynote speech is given by Aron Pilhofer \u201cFrom Redlining toRobots: How newsrooms apply technology to the craft of journalism\u201d. The invited talk is given by FriedrichLindenberg \u201cMining Leaks and Open Data to Follow the Money\u201d. We would like to thank SIGIR for hostingus. Thanks also go to the keynote speakers, the program committee, the paper authors, and the participants,for without these people there would be no worksho

Computational Controversy

Climate change, vaccination, abortion, Trump: Many topics are surrounded by fierce controversies. The nature of such heated debates and their elements have been studied extensively in the social science literature. More recently, various computational approaches to controversy analysis have appeared, using new data sources such as Wikipedia, which help us now better understand these phenomena. However, compared to what social sciences have discovered about such debates, the existing computational approaches mostly focus on just a few of the many important aspects around the concept of controversies. In order to link the two strands, we provide and evaluate here a controversy model that is both, rooted in the findings of the social science literature and at the same time strongly linked to computational methods. We show how this model can lead to computational controversy analytics that have full coverage over all the crucial aspects that make up a controversy.Comment: In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo) 201

Controversy Detection and Stance Analysis

Alerting users about controversial search results can encour-age critical literacy, promote healthy civic discourse and counteract the “filter bubble ” effect. Additionally, present-ing information to the user about the different stances or sides of the debate can help her navigate the landscape of search results. Our existing work made strides in the emerg-ing niche of controversy detection and analysis; we propose further work on automatic stance detection

Third international workshop on recent trends in news information retrieval (NEWSIR'19)

The journalism industry has undergone a revolution in the past decade, leading to new opportunities as well as challenges. News consumption, production and delivery have all been affected and transformed by technology. Readers require new mechanisms to cope with the vast volume of information in order to be informed about news events. Reporters have begun to use natural language processing (NLP) and (IR) techniques for investigative work. Publishers and aggregators are seeking new business models, and new ways to reach and retain their audience. A shift in business models has led to a gradual shift in styles of journalism in attempts to increase page views; and, far more concerning, to real mis- and dis-information, alongside allegations of “fake news” threatening the journalistic freedom and integrity of legitimate news outlets. Social media platforms drive viewership, creating filter bubbles and an increasingly polarized readership. News documents have always been a part of research on information access and retrieval methods. Over the last few years, the IR community has increasingly recognized these challenges in journalism and opened a conversation about how we might begin to address them. Evidence of this recognition is the participation in the two previous editions of our NewsIR workshop, held in ECIR 2016 and 2018. One of the most important outcomes of those workshops is an increasing awareness in the community about the changing nature of journalism and the IR challenges it entails. To move yet another step forward, the goal of the third edition of our workshop is to create a multidisciplinary venue that brings together news experts from both technology and journalism. This would take NewsIR from a European forum targeting mainly IR researchers, into a more inclusive and influential international forum. We hope that this new format will foster further understanding for both news professionals and IR researchers, as well as producing better outcomes for news consumers. We will address the possibilities and challenges that technology offers to the journalists, the challenges that new developments in journalism create for IR researchers, and the complexity of information access tasks for news readers

Harnessing the Potential of the “Demotic Turn” to Authoritarian Ends: Caller Participation and Weaponized Communication on US Conservative Talk Radio Programs

International audienceAudience participation is a standard feature of US conservative talk radio (CTR) shows. The leading format among non-musical radio programs, CTR provides listeners with a daily opportunity to speak on air. As a radio genre that claims to be participatory, it is intended to be a forum where listeners can engage in conversation with the host. However, these shows also convey a form of authoritarian discourse, which is not only expressed discursively but reflected more specifically in the hosts’ approach to media practice, the specificity of the shows’ apparatus, and within it, in the status of the audience such as it is embodied by callers. In this chapter, Sébastien Mort analyzes how the affordances of CTR shows’ apparatus enable the hosts of nationally syndicated CTR programs to instrumentalize audience participation as part of their strategic use of “weaponized communication”, typical of authoritarian figures. Here, audience participation is instrumentalized to forge a representation of what is supposed to be an archetypal conservative, through a simulacrum of democratic exchange that the shows’ apparatus creates