WIREDGOV

The UK is in a strong position to be a world leader in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

This position, coupled with the wider adoption of AI, could deliver a major boost to the economy for years to come.  The best way to do this is to put ethics at the centre of AI’s development & use concludes a report by the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, AI in the UK: ready, willing and able?.

One of the recommendations of the report is for a cross-sector AI Code to be established, which can be adopted nationally, & internationally. The Committee’s suggested five principles for such a code are:

• AI should be developed for the common good & benefit of humanity.
• AI should operate on principles of intelligibility & fairness.
• AI should not be used to diminish the data rights or privacy of individuals, families or communities.
• All citizens should have the right to be educated to enable them to flourish mentally, emotionally and economically alongside AI.
• The autonomous power to hurt, destroy or deceive human beings should never be vested in AI.

Facebook announced earlier this month that it had removed dozens of accounts & more than 100 pages controlled by the Russian propaganda organisation & ‘troll farm’, the Internet Research Agency (IRA).

However, this is a retroactive step and the damage has already been done.

The post describes how ‘the IRA has repeatedly used complex networks of inauthentic accounts to deceive & manipulate people who use Facebook, including before, during and after the 2016 US presidential elections’.  These pages and accounts, it added, were removed ‘solely because they were controlled by the IRA – not based on the content’.

This represents an apparent change in Facebook’s policy, as it amounts to proscribing & ‘blacklisting’ an entire organisation, rather than simply removing content that is deemed to breach the platform’s Terms of Service.

The IRA’s social media disinformation campaigns have been well documented since a 2015 New York Times Magazine investigation revealed how the St Petersburg-based organisation had ‘industrialized the art of trolling’.

Facebook’s actions therefore raise 2 important questions:

• Why has this not been done sooner?

and does this mark a step change in the way that social media companies deal with disinformation?

A UK-wide campaign to encourage patients to change from their pyjamas and get moving around is being supported by the Chief Nursing Officer for Wales, Professor Jean White.

The #EndPJParalysis 70-day challenge aims to achieve 1m patient days of relevant patients being dressed in day clothes and moving around, over a 70 day period.  The challenge will run until 26 June 2018 in a number of health & care organisations across the UK to mark the 70th anniversary of the NHS.  

It has been found that 60% of immobile patients had no medical reason that required bed rest, and that 10 days of bed rest could lead to up to 10 years' worth of muscle mass loss in patients over 80 years old. 

Participating in such a scheme also leads to benefits such as:

• a reduction in the length of stay
• reduced loss of mobility, deconditioning and risk of falls
• reduced food wastage due to greater patient mobility and energy need
• reduced risk of needing institutional care on discharge
• enhanced wellbeing of patients & staff