From to: TIFF's Films on Power, Creation, and Survival Are a Warning These are WIRED's picks for some of the most urgent and unsettling films from the 50th annual Toronto International Film Festival. Some of the most urgent films at this year's Toronto International Film Festival aren't here to soothe. Together,,, and play like sizzle reels of caution, and at their best, they're award-worthy symbols of alarm. These films, the first two of which are documentaries, don't just entertain--they confront fractured humanity, closeness and distance under Israel's siege of Gaza, and a creation we've set loose, growing beyond our control. That's the one muscle of film--to interrogate rather than facilitate.

Gender-Based Violence (GBV) is an increasing problem online, but existing datasets fail to capture the plurality of possible annotator perspectives or ensure the representation of affected groups. We revisit two important stages in the moderation pipeline for GBV: (1) manual data labelling; and (2) automated classification. For (1), we examine two datasets to investigate the relationship between annotator identities and attitudes and the responses they give to two GBV labelling tasks. To this end, we collect demographic and attitudinal information from crowd-sourced annotators using three validated surveys from Social Psychology. We find that higher Right Wing Authoritarianism scores are associated with a higher propensity to label text as sexist, while for Social Dominance Orientation and Neosexist Attitudes, higher scores are associated with a negative tendency to do so. For (2), we conduct classification experiments using Large Language Models and five prompting strategies, including infusing prompts with annotator information. We find: (i) annotator attitudes affect the ability of classifiers to predict their labels; (ii) including attitudinal information can boost performance when we use well-structured brief annotator descriptions; and (iii) models struggle to reflect the increased complexity and imbalanced classes of the new label sets.

In a recent Living in the Solutionpodcast with otolaryngologist and broadcaster Elaina George at Liberty Talk radio, Wesley J. Smith, lawyer and host of the Humanize podcast at Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism tackled the question of "Can You be a Christian and Believe in Transhumanism?" (June 4, 2022) Transhumanism or H, as it is sometimes called, is a movement to create immortality through new biotechnology or merger with artificial intelligence (AI). In the first portion of the podcast, which we covered on Sunday, June 12, they talked about the way being a human, a computer, or an animal is viewed by transhumanists as all just a choice now, thanks to new technology. In the second, they looked at the religious elements in transhumanism. In this third and final segment, they discuss the difference in values between Christianity and transhumanism. A partial transcript and notes follow.

The panel on'The Five' sounds off on DHS chief's defense of new bureaucracy The Biden administration announced the establishment of the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) last week to be created within the Homeland Security Department (DHS), aiming to counter "misinformation related to homeland security." There are many unknowns about DGB. For example, we don't know how the members of DGB will be selected, what kind of power it will have, and how it defines misinformation. But the early signs are not promising. The vaguely defined roles and authorities of DGB have alarmed Americans, and many see the agency as the "Ministry of Truth" that George Orwell warned us about in his dystopian novel "1984."

Artificial intelligence is going to reorganize the world and change the course of human history. With China increasingly using technology to usher in a new form of authoritarianism, the world's democracies must come together and stand up for their own values and strategic interests. The world is only starting to grapple with how profound the artificial-intelligence revolution will be. AI technologies will create waves of progress in critical infrastructure, commerce, transportation, health, education, financial markets, food production, and environmental sustainability. Successful adoption of AI will drive economies, reshape societies, and determine which countries set the rules for the coming century.

The first tactic in the digital authoritarian toolkit is to establish information walls through fear, friction, or flooding. While employing traditional methods of repression and punishment to censor through fear, digital authoritarians also make it more difficult for citizens to access information through internet shutdowns, firewalls, and paywalls. In addition, digital dictators target traditional democratic values and freedoms by flooding the internet and other outlets for speech, press, and assembly. Inauthentic accounts ("bots"), deepfakes, and new tools of digital propaganda help states amplify narratives, build polarization, and increase "us versus them" divisions. With information walls, regimes can shape public opinion in newly-sophisticated ways by establishing state control over the messages their population can access--and the information they do not.

Reading this tweet by Maciej Ceglowski makes me want to set down a conjecture that I've been entertaining for the last couple of years (in part thanks to having read Maciej's and Kieran's previous work as well as talking lots to Marion Fourcade). The conjecture (and it is no more than a plausible conjecture) is simple, but it straightforwardly contradicts the collective wisdom that is emerging in Washington DC, and other places too. This collective wisdom is that China is becoming a kind of all-efficient Technocratic Leviathan thanks to the combination of machine learning and authoritarianism. Authoritarianism has always been plagued with problems of gathering and collating information and of being sufficiently responsive to its citizens' needs to remain stable. Now, the story goes, a combination of massive data gathering and machine learning will solve the basic authoritarian dilemma.

Of all the emerging technologies that will change our daily lives, none has more transformative potential than artificial intelligence. And AI -- the use of computers to solve problems that would normally require natural, or human, intelligence -- will also have a profound effect on the global balance of economic and military power. It will change how societies are governed and people are ruled. Debates about whether China or the U.S. will dominate the 21st century are thus necessarily debates about who will lead in AI innovation, and whether democratic or authoritarian systems are better suited to that challenge. A new report from the bipartisan National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence contains reason for cautious optimism on that latter question, even as it reminds us that an authoritarian China will be a formidable competitor indeed.

Weather wars, authoritarian surveillance, social control, and more are "Future Shocks" that could fundamentally destabilize the world as we know it, according to the WEF. The World Economic Forum (WEF) is currently underway in Davos, Switzerland, but a week before the event, the WEF Global Risks Report 2019 was published identifying weather manipulation tools, social control through biometric surveillance, AI "woebots" that can feed on human emotions, and more as "Future Shocks" that could forever alter the course of human history. "Authoritarianism is easier in a world of total visibility and traceability" The WEF report for 2019 lists 10 "Future Shocks," which are not predictions, but rather "food for thought and action" about current technologies and trends that have the potential to shake up society, for good or ill, in the very near future. Since we at The Sociable like to focus on the technological side of things, especially as how it relates to social impact, let's take a closer look at the Future Shocks that pertain more to technology. "Weather manipulation tools-- such as cloud seeding to induce or suppress rain--are not new" Make no mistake, weather manipulation tools do exist, yet not a single government or group has claimed responsibility for using this technology as a weapon.

The Chinese government has wholeheartedly embraced surveillance technology to exercise control over its citizenry in ways both big and small. It's facial-scanning passers-by to arrest criminals at train stations, gas pumps, and sports stadiums and broadcasting the names of individual jaywalkers. Government-maintained social credit scores affect Chinese citizens' rights and privileges if they associate with dissidents. In Tibet and Xinjiang, the government is using facial recognition and big data to surveil the physical movements of ethnic minorities, individually and collectively, to predict and police demonstrations before they even start. China is even using facial recognition to prevent the overuse of toilet paper in some public bathrooms.