For decades, code contributions have been how open source projects learned who to trust. People would show up, do the work, take responsibility for their changes, and stick around. Over time, trust emerged from the work itself. AI tools have changed the economics of this very quickly. We use them ourselves every day, but a pull request no longer tells us as much as it used to about the person submitting it. A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds. For a browser, this matters. A browser runs untrusted input from the entire internet on the user’s machine, and one well-disguised vulnerability is all an attacker needs. We have already seen patient, well-resourced campaigns in open source to earn maintainer trust and abuse it. What has changed is how much faster and cheaper it has become to produce work that looks like a serious contribution.

Prof. Geoffrey Hinton

"There is a robust debate going on in the computing industry about how to create it, and whether it can even be created at all."

Four databases of citizen science and crowdsourcing projects —  SciStarter, the Citizen Science Association (CSA), CitSci.org, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (the Wilson Center Commons Lab) — are working on a common project metadata schema to support data sharing with the goal of maintaining accurate and up to date information about citizen science projects.  The federal government is joining this conversation with a cross-agency effort to promote citizen science and crowdsourcing as a tool to advance agency missions. Specifically, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), in collaboration with the U.S. Federal Community of Practice for Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing (FCPCCS),is compiling an Open Innovation Toolkit containing resources for federal employees hoping to implement citizen science and crowdsourcing projects. Navigation through this toolkit will be facilitated in part through a system of metadata tags. In addition, the Open Innovation Toolkit will link to the Wilson Center’s database of federal citizen science and crowdsourcing projects.These groups became aware of their complementary efforts and the shared challenge of developing project metadata tags, which gave rise to the need of a workshop.  

We live in an age of paradox. Systems using artificial intelligence match or surpass human level performance in more and more domains, leveraging rapid advances in other technologies and driving soaring stock prices. Yet measured productivity growth has fallen in half over the past decade, and real income has stagnated since the late 1990s for a majority of Americans. Brynjolfsson, Rock, and Syverson describe four potential explanations for this clash of expectations and statistics: false hopes, mismeasurement, redistribution, and implementation lags. While a case can be made for each explanation, the researchers argue that lags are likely to be the biggest reason for paradox. The most impressive capabilities of AI, particularly those based on machine learning, have not yet diffused widely. More importantly, like other general purpose technologies, their full effects won't be realized until waves of complementary innovations are developed and implemented. The adjustment costs, organizational changes and new skills needed for successful AI can be modeled as a kind of intangible capital. A portion of the value of this intangible capital is already reflected in the market value of firms. However, most national statistics will fail to capture the full benefits of the new technologies and some may even have the wrong sign