(This post originally appeared on blog.mozilla.org) By Mark Surman & Camille François Last week was an important moment in the debate about AI, with President Biden issuing an executive order and the UK’s AI Safety Summit convening world leaders. Much of the buzz around these events made it sound like AI presents us with a binary choice: unbridled optimism, or existential fear. But there was also a third path available, a nuanced, practical perspective that examines the real risks and benefits of AI.  There have been people promoting this third perspective for years — although GP ..read more

Early next year, we will launch Mozilla Ventures, a first-of-its-kind impact venture fund to invest in startups that push the internet — and the tech industry — in a better direction  ___ Many people complain about today’s tech industry. Some say the internet has lost its soul. And some even say it’s impossible to make it better.  My response: we won’t know unless we try, together.  Personally, I think it is possible to build successful companies — and great internet products — that put people before profits. Mozilla proves this. But so do WordPress, Hugging Face, ProtonMail, Ki ..read more

Over the last few years, Mozilla has turned its attention to AI, asking: how can we make the data driven technologies we all use everyday more trustworthy? How can we make things like social networks, home assistants and search engines both more helpful and less harmful in the era ahead? In 2021, we will take a next step with this work by digging deeper in three areas where we think we can make real progress: transparency, bias and better data governance. While these may feel like big, abstract concepts at first glance, all three are at the heart of problems we hear about everyday in the news ..read more

Over the last few years, Mozilla has increasingly turned its attention to the question of ‘how we build more trustworthy AI?’ Data is at the core of this question. Who has our data? What are they using it for? Do they have my interests in mind, or only their own? Do I trust them? We decided earlier this year that ‘better data stewardship’ should be one of the three big areas of focus for our trustworthy AI work. One part of this focus is supporting the growing field of people working on data trusts, data cooperatives and other efforts to build trust and shift power dynamics around data. In par ..read more

For many years now — and well before I sought out the job I have today — I thought: the world needs more organizations like Mozilla. Given the state of the internet, it needs them now. And, it will likely need them for a very long time to come.  Why? In part because the internet was founded with public benefit in mind. And, as the Mozilla Manifesto declared back in 2007, “… (m)agnifying the public benefit aspects of the internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.”  Today, this sort of ‘time and attention’ is more important — and urgent —  than ever ..read more

By Mark Surman  Right now, we’re in the early stages of the next phase of computing: AI. First we had the desktop. Then the internet. And smartphones. Increasingly, we’re living in a world where computing is built around vast troves of data and the algorithms that parse them. They power everything from the social platforms and smart speakers we use everyday, to the digital machinery of our governments and economies. In parallel, we’re entering a new phase of  how we think about, deploy, and regulate technology. Will the AI era be defined by individual privacy and transparency into ho ..read more

A little over two years ago, Mozilla started an ambitious project: deciding where we should focus our efforts to grow the movement of people committed to building a healthier digital world. We landed on the idea of trustworthy AI.  When Mozilla started in 1998, the growth of the web was defining where computing was going. So Mozilla focused on web standards and building a browser. Today, computing — and the digital society that we all live in — is defined by vast troves of data, sophisticated algorithms and omnipresent sensors and devices. This is the era of AI. Asking questions today suc ..read more

Will things like digital contact tracing leave a legacy of better privacy norms, or worse ones? The conversation about privacy and the pandemic — and about the idea of digital contact tracing in particular — has shifted a great deal in the last few weeks. It’s moved from an understandable ‘we don’t want to live in this dystopian science fiction novel’ gut response (my initial gut reaction) to a vigorous debate about whether privacy-by-design and good data governance make it possible to trace COVID contacts in a way that we can all trust (I’m still trying to sort through all this). A recent twe ..read more

A little over a year ago, I wrote the first of many posts arguing: if we want a healthy internet — and a healthy digital society — we need to make sure AI is trustworthy. AI, and the large pools of data that fuel it, are central to how computing works today. If we want apps, social networks, online stores and digital government to serve us as people — and as citizens — we need to make sure the way we build with AI has things like privacy and fairness built in from the get go.    Since writing that post, a number of us at Mozilla — along with literally hundreds of partners and co ..read more

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a set of questions about the Internet Society’s plan to sell the non-profit Public Interest Registry (PIR) to Ethos capital on the Mozilla blog. As the EFF recently explained, the stakes of who runs PIR are high. PIR manages all of the dot org domain names in the world. It is the steward responsible for ensuring millions of public interest orgs have domain names with reliable uptime and freedom from censorship. The importance of good dot org stewardship spurred not only Mozilla but also groups like EFF, Packet Clearing House and ICANN itself to raise serious que ..read more