Google has posted a list of ethical principles for AI work.

What I note is that principle 5, about privacy, is a small step in the right direction, but far short of what we need to avoid a China-style society of total surveillance.

In particular, asking for users' consent is totally ineffective as a way of protecting society from systematic surveillance, if refusing said consent is considered by most people to be utterly impossible. Look at the terms for a Google account: obscene surveillance, but only by consent. If refusal is not a practical, easy thing, it's not really consent.

The EFF has some other criticisms, on issues I think are important but not as important as this one.

The EU's Copyright Proposal is Extremely Bad News for Everyone, Even (Especially!) Wikipedia.

Saboteur of Housing Carson's rent increase would increase the rents for people in public housing by 20% on the average. But some would suffer a 50% increase.

He displays the usual Republican blackwhiting by saying this would "give poor people a way out of poverty" — unless he's envisioning the path to the cemetery.

Homelessness in the US is already increasing, but the rent increase will accelerate it.

I expect the newly homeless will have trouble getting permission to vote in Republican-controlled states. Republicans surely consider that a plus.

The Pentagon has accepted "infinite war" as its mission.

According to Greg Jaffe, "winning for much of the U.S. military’s top brass has come to be synonymous with staying put." Air Force General Mike Holmes says that the goal is "not losing. It’s staying in the game."

Facebook erroneously made millions of users' private postings visible to all useds.

Everyone makes mistakes, so I won't reproach Facebook for the mistake itself. However, this mistake demonstrates the folly of using a single system for both publication and private communications. They ought to be separate systems.