Suppose we’ve trained a system to make medical diagnoses. The system, perfectly trained, has specific recall and accuracy. (recall: of all the diseases that have been submitted, what percentage did I recognize? precision: of all those that I identified as diseases, in what percentage were they really?) Accuracy and recall are a short blanket. it does not depend on a “calibration” of the machine, it is not an inherent error. it is a matter of statistical properties. We know the system, perfectly trained, will make incorrect predictions. Of course, even aspecialist doctor makes incorrect predictions. For this reason his predictions…

-(A sunday morning provocation) Artificial Intelligence is a name born in 1956. It has gained a lot of attention thanks to its resonance with humans, and favoured the devlopment of an imaginative Hollywood production stream. The name “artificial intelligence” has an implicit bias that does not allow for a cognitive perception adherent to reality. On the contrary, the name favours the suggestion of the possibility of machines to develop some form of consciouness, emotions, acquire a “personality” similar to humans’ and, ultimately overcome human limitations and developing a self superior to humans. You’ve seen the movies, you know the narrative……

[draft] We recently had a debate in Italy about anonimity on social networks and the possibility/difficulty/impossibility to prosecute possible online crimes. The whole debate started when a politician proposed to impose registration to social networks with personal IDs. This is a recurrent proposal. In every legislature, at least since the early 2000 some member of the parliament makes a similar proposal, there’s a public debate (now on twitter..) and then everything vanishes after a couple of days. The proposal is both technically impractical and politically unsettling, given it exposes commenting persons to possible retaliations for their opinions determining a chilling…

Molte persone si sono ormai rassegnate a dover scegliere tra la propria privacy e l’uso dello smartphone. Se da un lato si ottengono le ben note comodità dei servizi offerti da Google e Apple, dall’altro bisogna rinunciare a molti aspetti della propia privacy. /e/OS è un sistema operativo per smartphone che cerca di ovviare a questo compromesso fornendo servizi privacy-oriented (anche self-hosted) integrati nel sistema. /e/OS è basato su Android, più precisamente è un fork di LineageOS, progettato per poter usufruire di un sistema Android libero dalle catene di Google. Gli sviluppatori hanno infatti lavorato a fondo per la rimozione…

just a quick thought: it’s just an idea that is starting to buz zin my mind… one of the problems of the immaterial dimension determined by digital tools is the fact that computers can scale actions to a dimension and with a speed unparalleled in the material dimension. think to network effects and lockins and their impact on competition; it’s pretty obvious. think to fake news and online hate speech: once confined in the material realm, it could not spread easily and tended to deaden. (less in stadiums, cocnerts, and other venues where scale becomes an issue) think to the…

This post, in italian, is a followup to an interview I gave a couple of weeks ago on national radio Radio24 interviewed by Enrico Pagliarini. He was puzzled learning that I don’t use (almost) any of the most common internet service so we chatted about tools I use instead. Blog reader Antonio Massaro thought a good idea was to publish a blog post about it and he pushed me to write it. — Questo post è il seguito di un’intervista che ho rilasciato un paio di settimane fa su Radio24 intervistato da Enrico Pagliarini. E’ stato incuriosito dal sapere che…

The attorneys general of Australia, the UK and the US have written an open letter to Facebook calling for a delay in introducing end to end encryption in messengers. here it is: HS_open_letter_to_Mark_Zuckerberg This must be the same australian person who once said that, in Australia, State laws prevail on the laws of mathematics. “We are committed to working with you to focus on reasonable proposals that will allow Facebook and our governments to protect your users and the public, while protecting their privacy. Our technical experts are confident that we can do so while defending cybersecurity and supporting technological…

Deepfakes in real time have become famous because they allow a person to impersonate a celebrity by making him say what he wants. but it also allows a person to say anything hiding behind an ordinary person, a sort of “videoalias”. to know who says what, it is no longer enough to simply watch a video while listening to the voice of the speaker. seeing is no longer believing. like today we don’t trust a piece of news written in a twit but we look at who writes it, soon we won’t trust what we see anymore, the context will…

Today I participated in a breakfast meeting of the Bruno Leoni Institute on the subject of taxation of digital income . (Unfortunately, I arrived late). But the speaker was my friend Massimiliano Trovato; we know each other’s theses very well (we know very well what is the microdetail that divides us and from which our different points of view derive) and I could make my own argument (as a contribution from the public) without leaving the theme. IMHO, as you know, we are facing a new type of income and as such should be treated (explanation). Then a man intervened…