July 2024

Illuminate Your Community’s Future: Join the Brightening Connected Communities Pilot Project

Imagine transforming your community’s lighting grid into a high-bandwidth communication network, extending coverage, and enhancing connectivity across neighborhoods and business parks. The Brightening Connected Communities with Innovation Pilot Project will identify and test a mix of community partners. Selected projects will demonstrate novel use cases of Signify’s BrightSites technology to increase connectivity and help solve public safety, public connectivity, and transportation challenges.

Sponsor:

Next Century Cities

Date:

Thu, 07/25/2024 - 14:00

Scott Skinner-Thompson is an associate professor at Colorado Law School where he researches constitutional law, civil rights, and privacy law, with a particular focus on LGBTQ and HIV issues. Bringing together these topics, his book, Privacy at the Margins, examines how privacy can function as an expressive, anti-subordination tool of resistance to surveillance regimes.

Skinner-Thompson's most recent article discussing recent anti-trans legislation across the US and its devastating impact, Trans Animus, is available on SSRN.

Read more about Broadband Book Club: Privacy at the Margins

2024 I Love My Librarian Honorees (Carnegie Corporation)

Submitted by benton on Tue, 07/23/2024 - 11:14

Broadband expansion is no high-speed fix

They say Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither is broadband. One in five New Mexicans don’t have reliable high-speed internet at a time when such technology is a necessity, not a luxury. It’s imperative that constituents, households, businesses and other entities have broadband that delivers telehealth, distance learning, government services, job creation, economic growth and other vital services. Throughout New Mexico—particularly in rural areas and the 23 tribal communities—lack of accessible and reliable internet continues to hinder people from getting online.

AI companies promised to self-regulate one year ago. What’s changed?

On July 21, 2023, seven leading AI companies—Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI—committed with the White House to a set of eight voluntary commitments on how to develop AI in a safe and trustworthy way. These included promises to do things like improve the testing and transparency around AI systems, and share information on potential harms and risks. On the first anniversary of the voluntary commitments, the tech sector has made some welcome progress, with big caveats. Companies are doing more to pursue technical fixes such as red-teaming (

AI Impact on Power and Broadband

AI technology seems to be a hot topic in every industry, and broadband is no exception. It seems inevitable that AI will be used to help monitor and control complex broadband networks. It looks like the biggest ISPs are already phasing AI into the customer service process. The big question that nobody seems to be able to answer is if AI will change the amount of broadband the average household uses. It’s not an easy question to answer. Corporate AI centers will use lots of energy, data, and broadband. The impact on home broadband is harder to predict.

The double-edged sword of AI in education

Artificial intelligence (AI) could revolutionize education as profoundly as the internet has already revolutionized our lives. However, our experience with commercial internet platforms gives us pause. Like the commercialization of the internet, the AI consumerization trend, driven by massive investments across sectors, prioritizes profit over societal and educational benefits. We must advocate for a thoughtful, education-centric approach to AI development that enhances, rather than replaces, human intelligence and recognises the value of effort in learning. Some of the potential risks: