Jonathan Zittrain

“Bear with me,” Jonathan Zittrain urged the audience as his talk — up to this point, a romp through the early history of the internet — lurched into Kantian philosophy: “I’m about to get all ‘East Coast’ on you.” Zittrain, faculty director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, was in Palo Alto, Calif., delivering an energetic presentation on the ethical responsibilities of tech companies toward consumers in the era of artificial intelligence. About the shift of technology environments from unowned to owned and tightly controlled, he asked, “When is it that ‘can’ implies ‘ought’?” His provocative keynote was the culmination of a Harvard Tech Startup Night hosted by Harvard Office of Technology Development (OTD) and the law firm WilmerHale at its Palo Alto offices.

Artificial intelligence is often hailed as a great catalyst of medical innovation, a way to find cures to diseases that have confounded doctors and make health care more efficient, personalized, and accessible. But what if it turns out to be poison? Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor, posed that question during a conference in Boston Tuesday that examined the use of AI to accelerate the delivery of precision medicine to the masses. He used an alarming metaphor to explain his concerns: “I think of machine learning kind of as asbestos,” he said. “It turns out that it’s all over the place, even though at no point did you explicitly install it, and it has possibly some latent bad effects that you might regret later, after it’s already too hard to get it all out.”

ow do you start to wrap your head around some of the most fundamental issues surrounding new technology and how it impacts society? If you’re Jonathan Zittrain, you take this “brainstorming exercise,” as he calls it, and force it into the real world. Zittrain is, among other honorifics, a Harvard Law School professor and the faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He’s also the force behind Assembly, a collaboration between Berkman Klein and the MIT Media Lab, a program which is taking a unique approach to solving problems related to AI and ethics.

Last June, a team at Harvard Medical School and MIT showed that it’s pretty darn easy to fool an artificial intelligence system analyzing medical images. Researchers modified a few pixels in eye images, skin photos and chest X-rays to trick deep learning systems into confidently classifying perfectly benign images as malignant. ... Jonathan Zittrain, cofounder of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, had similar questions when he read the team’s paper. “I was reminded of the time in the early 2000's when cybersecurity vulnerabilities were readily apparent but not yet often exploited,” Zittrain tells IEEE Spectrum.

Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved a device that can capture an image of your retina and automatically detect signs of diabetic blindness. This new breed of artificial intelligence technology is rapidly spreading across the medical field, as scientists develop systems that can identify signs of illness and disease in a wide variety of images, from X-rays of the lungs to C.A.T. scans of the brain. These systems promise to help doctors evaluate patients more efficiently, and less expensively, than in the past. ...Ideally, such systems would improve the efficiency of the health care system. But they may carry unintended consequences, a group of researchers at Harvard and M.I.T. warns. In a paper [co-authored by Jonathan Zittrain] published on Thursday in the journal Science, the researchers raise the prospect of “adversarial attacks” — manipulations that can change the behavior of A.I. systems using tiny pieces of digital data. By changing a few pixels on a lung scan, for instance, someone could fool an A.I. system into seeing an illness that is not really there, or not seeing one that is.

Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is mulling the use of decentralized technology for his social media behemoth. Speaking with Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said blockchain technology could be implemented as an alternative way for users to access, store and manage their private data. “Basically, you take your information, you store it on some decentralized system and you have the choice of whether to log in to different places and you’re not going through an intermediary,” he said in the Facebook Live interview.

This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday. .... Mark Zuckerberg started his 2019 challenge of doing public debates. Zuckerberg took part in an interview with Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain. Mark Zuckerberg said he doesn't want "a camera in everyone's living room," but seemed to forget that Facebook sells a camera that goes in living rooms. Jonathan Zittrain pointed out that Facebook sells a camera-equipped device for the living room — Facebook Portal, its smart speaker with video calling.

The U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security is conducting a hearing on election security tomorrow. It’s part of a series the new Democratic majority in the House is holding related to the H.R. 1 legislation on election security, campaign funding, and government ethics, entitled the “For the People Act.” ... Just Security asked several experts what questions they think would be fruitful for discussion at the hearing. ... Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and Co-Founder of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society

An op-ed by Adam Holland, project manager at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: In April 2018, the scandal over how Cambridge Analytica gained access to personal data of 50 million Facebook users led to CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress and an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. A September 2018 security breach involved the personal information of at least 30 million users. ... A promising way forward comes from Professors Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School and Jack M. Balkin of Yale Law School, whose work was incorporated into draft federal legislation.

Far-reaching discussions about the social impact of AI on the world are taking place among data scientists across the University, as well as in the Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative launched by Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center, together with the MIT Media Lab. This intensifying focus on ethics originated with a longtime member of the computer-science faculty. ... Bemis Professor of International Law and professor of computer science Jonathan Zittrain, who is faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, has been grappling with this goal from a proto-legal perspective.

Consumers are increasingly entrusting online services with all kinds of personal data — but that trust has been repeatedly abused or taken for granted. If a doctor or a lawyer did that, they’d be kicked to the curb, because they have a legally defined duty to protect privileged data. Why don’t Facebook and Google? They might soon, via the Data Care Act. This bill, proposed today by Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) and co-sponsored by 14 more Democrats in the Senate, would essentially establish a set of consumer protection duties, defined and enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, preventing tech companies from knowingly doing harm to their users. ...The idea has been brought up before, notably by Yale’s Jack Bardin and Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain, whom Sen. Schatz has previously cited.

At a time when social media affects everything from our private lives to our public discourse, the rules governing online behavior are increasingly under scrutiny. At Facebook, the process behind those rules — how they are determined, and how they continue to change — is the province of Monika Bickert, the head of global policy management. On Monday, Bickert, who holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, joined Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law, for a wide-ranging conversation about the social media giant’s policies and its evolution. The event, which included tough questions from audience members on the company’s recent headline-making controversies, was hosted by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.