Mediaboss Marketing

(Getty Images/istockphoto / Peshkova)

The debate on contact-tracing highlights the urgency of tackling unregulated technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). With a strong democracy and reputation for first-class research, Switzerland has the potential to be at the forefront of shaping ethical AI.

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? "Artificial intelligence is either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity," the prominent scientist, Stephen Hawking, who died in 2018, once said.

An expert group set up by the European Commission presented a draft ofethics guidelinesexternal linkfor trustworthy AI at the end of 2018, but as of yet there is no agreed global strategy for defining common principles, which would include rules on transparency, privacy protection, fairness, and justice.

Thanks to its unique features a strong democracy, its position of neutrality, and world-class research Switzerland is well positioned to play a leading role in shaping the future of AI that adheres toethical standards. The Swiss government recognizes the importance of AI to move the country forward, and with that in mind, has been involved in discussions at the international level.

What is AI?

There is no single accepted definition of Artificial Intelligence. Often, it's divided into two categories, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which strives to closely replicate human behaviour while Narrow Artificial Intelligence focuses on single tasks, such as face recognition, automated translations and content recommendations, such as videos on YouTube.

However, on the domestic front, the debate has just begun, albeit in earnest as Switzerland and other nations are confronted with privacy concerns surrounding the use of new technologieslike contact-tracing apps, whether they use AI or not, to stop the spread of Covid-19.

The European initiative the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing initiative PEPP-PT advocated a centralized data approach that raised concern about its transparency and governance. However, it was derailed when a number of nations, including Switzerland, decided in favour of a decentralized and privacy-enhancing system, called DP-3T (Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing). The final straw for PEPP-PT was when Germany decided to exit as well.

"Europe has engaged in a vigorous and lively debate over the merits of the centralized and decentralized approach to proximity tracing. This debate has been very beneficial as it made the issues aware to a broad population and demonstrated the high level of concern with which these apps are being designed and constructed. People will use the contact-tracing app only if they feel that they don't have to sacrifice their privacy to get out of isolation," said Jim Larus. Larus is Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) at EPFL Lausanne and a member of the group that initially started the DP3T effort at EPFL.

According to a recent survey, nearly two-thirds of Swiss citizens said they were in favour of contact tracing. The DP-3T app is currently being tested on a trial basis, while waiting for the definition of the legal conditions for its widespread use, as decided by the Swiss parliament.However, the debate highlights the urgency of answering questions surrounding ethics and governance of unregulated technologies.

+ Read more about the controversial Swiss app

The "Swiss way"

Artificial intelligence was included for the first time in the Swiss government's strategy to create the right conditions to accelerate the digital transformation of society.

Last December, a working group delivered its report to the Federal Council (executive body) called the "Challenges of Artificial Intelligence". The report stated that Switzerland was ready to exploit the potential of AI, but the authors decided not to specifically highlight the ethical issues and social dimension of AI, focusing instead on various AI use cases and the arising challenges.

"In Switzerland, the central government does not impose an overarching ethical vision for AI. It would be incompatible with our democratic traditions if the government prescribed this top-down," Daniel Egloff, Head of Innovation of the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) told swissinfo.ch. Egloff added that absolute ethical principles are difficult to establish since they could change from one technological context to another. "An ethical vision for AI is emerging in consultations among national and international stakeholders, including the public, and the government is taking an active role in this debate," he added.

Seen in a larger context, the government insists it is very involved internationally when it comes to discussions on ethics and human rights. Ambassador Thomas Schneider, Director of International Affairs at the Federal Office of Communications (OFCOM), told swissinfo.ch that Switzerland in this regard "is one of the most active countries in the Council of Europe, in the United Nations and other fora". He also added that it's OFCOM's and the Foreign Ministry's ambition to turn Geneva into a global centre of technology governance.

Just another buzzword?

How is it possible then to define what's ethical or unethical when it comes to technology? According to Pascal Kaufmann, neuroscientist and founder of theMindfire Foundationexternal linkfor human-centric AI, the concept of ethics applied to AI is just another buzzword: "There is a lot of confusion on the meaning of AI. What many call 'AI' has little to do with Intelligence and much more with brute force computing. That's why it makes little sense to talk about ethical AI. In order to be ethical, I suggest to hurry up and create AI for the people rather than for autocratic governments or for large tech companies.Inventing ethical policies doesn't get us anywhere and will not help us create AI.''

Anna Jobin, a postdoc at the Health Ethics and Policy Lab at the ETH Zurich, doesn't see it the same way. Based on her research, she believes that ethical considerations should be part of the development of AI: "We cannot treat AI as purely technological and add some ethics at the end, but ethical and social aspects need to be included in the discussion from the beginning." Because AI's impact on our daily lives will only grow, Jobin thinks that citizens need to be engaged in debates on new technologies that use AI and that decisions about AI should include civil society. However, she also recognizes the limits of listing ethical principles if there is a lack of ethical governance.

For Peter Seele, professor of Business Ethics at USI, the University of Italian-speaking Switzerland, the key to resolving these issues is to place business, ethics, and law on an equal footing. "Businesses are attracted by regulations. They need a legal framework to prosper. Good laws that align business and ethics create the ideal environment for all actors," he said. The challenge is to find a balance between the three pillars.

Artificial intelligence is being used to developrobots and drones that can explore dangerous places beyond the reach of humans and animals.

See in other languages: 4 See in other languages: 4 Languages: 4

The perfect combination

Even if the Swiss approach mainly relies on self-regulation, Seele argues that establishing a legal framework would give a significant impulse to the economy and society.

If Switzerland were to take a lead role in defining ethical standards, its political system based on direct democracy and democratically controlled cooperatives could play a central role in laying the foundation for the democratization of AI and the personal data economy. As the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences SATWsuggested in a whitepaper at the end of 2019, the model for that could be the SwissMIDATAexternal link, a nonprofit cooperative that ensures citizens' sovereignty over the use of their data, acting as a trustee for data collection. Owners of a data account can become members of MIDATA, participating in the democratic governance of the cooperative. They can also allow selective access to their personal data for clinical studies and medical research purposes.

The emergence of an open data ecosystem fostering the participation of civil society is raising awareness of the implications of the use of personal data, especially for health reasons, as in the case of the contact-tracing app. Even if it's argued that the favoured decentralized system does a better job preserving fundamental rights than a centralized approach, there are concerns about susceptibility to cyber attacks.

The creation of a legal basis for AI could ignite a public debate on the validity and ethics of digital systems.

Frida Polli is a neuroscientist and co-founder of pymetrics, an AI-based job matching platform based in the United States.

Horizontal Line

How the Swiss are moving back to the mountains

Form for signing up for free newsletter.

Sign up for our free newsletters and get the top stories delivered to your inbox.

View post:
Ethical artificial intelligence: Could Switzerland take the lead? - swissinfo.ch

Microsoft today announced that Azure Quantum, its partner-centric quantum computing platform for developers who want to get started with quantum computing, is now in limited preview. First announced at Microsoft Ignite 2019, Azure Quantum brings together the hardware from IonQ, Honeywell, QCI and Microsoft, services from the likes of 1QBit, and the classical computing capabilities of the Azure cloud. With this move to being in limited preview, Microsoft is now opening the service up to a small number of select partners and customers.

At its current stage, quantum computing isnt exactly a mission-critical capability for any business, but given how fast things are moving and how powerful the technology will be once its matured a bit over the next few years, many experts argue that now is the time to get started especially because of how different quantum computing is from classical computing and how it will take developers a while to develop.

At Ignite, Microsoft also open-sourced its Quantum Development Kit, compilers and simulators.

With all of this, the company is taking a different approach from some of its competitors. In addition, Microsoft also currently has to partner with quantum hardware companies simply because its own quantum hardware efforts havent quite reached the point where they are viable. The company is taking a very different approach from the likes of IBM or Rigetti by betting on a different kind of qubit at the core of its machine. And while it has made some breakthroughs in recent months, it doesnt yet have a working qubit or if it does, it hasnt publicly talked about it.

See the rest here:
Microsofts quantum computing platform is now in limited preview - TechCrunch

The coronavirus is proving that we have to move faster in identifying and mitigating epidemics before they become pandemics because, in todays global world, viruses spread much faster, further, and more frequently than ever before.

If COVID-19 has taught us anything, its that while our ability to identify and treat pandemics has improved greatly since the outbreak of the Spanish Flu in 1918, there is still a lot of room for improvement. Over the past few decades, weve taken huge strides to improve quick detection capabilities. It took a mere 12 days to map the outer spike protein of the COVID-19 virus using new techniques. In the 1980s, a similar structural analysis for HIV took four years.

But developing a cure or vaccine still takes a long time and involves such high costs that big pharma doesnt always have incentive to try.

Drug discovery entrepreneur Prof. Noor Shaker posited that Whenever a disease is identified, a new journey into the chemical space starts seeking a medicine that could become useful in contending diseases. The journey takes approximately 15 years and costs $2.6 billion, and starts with a process to filter millions of molecules to identify the promising hundreds with high potential to become medicines. Around 99% of selected leads fail later in the process due to inaccurate prediction of behavior and the limited pool from which they were sampled.

Prof. Shaker highlights one of the main problems with our current drug discovery process: The development of pharmaceuticals is highly empirical. Molecules are made and then tested, without being able to accurately predict performance beforehand. The testing process itself is long, tedious, cumbersome, and may not predict future complications that will surface only when the molecule is deployed at scale, further eroding the cost/benefit ratio of the field. And while AI/ML tools are already being developed and implemented to optimize certain processes, theres a limit to their efficiency at key tasks in the process.

Ideally, a great way to cut down the time and cost would be to transfer the discovery and testing from the expensive and time-inefficient laboratory process (in-vitro) we utilize today, to computer simulations (in-silico). Databases of molecules are already available to us today. If we had infinite computing power we could simply scan these databases and calculate whether each molecule could serve as a cure or vaccine to the COVID-19 virus. We would simply input our factors into the simulation and screen the chemical space for a solution to our problem.

In principle, this is possible. After all, chemical structures can be measured, and the laws of physics governing chemistry are well known. However, as the great British physicist Paul Dirac observed: The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble.

In other words, we simply dont have the computing power to solve the equations, and if we stick to classical computers we never will.

This is a bit of a simplification, but the fundamental problem of chemistry is to figure out where electrons sit inside a molecule and calculate the total energy of such a configuration. With this data, one could calculate the properties of a molecule and predict its behavior. Accurate calculations of these properties will allow the screening of molecular databases for compounds that exhibit particular functions, such as a drug molecule that is able to attach to the coronavirus spike and attack it. Essentially, if we could use a computer to accurately calculate the properties of a molecule and predict its behavior in a given situation, it would speed up the process of identifying a cure and improve its efficiency.

Why are quantum computers much better than classical computers at simulating molecules?

Electrons spread out over the molecule in a strongly correlated fashion, and the characteristics of each electron depend greatly on those of its neighbors. These quantum correlations (or entanglement) are at the heart of the quantum theory and make simulating electrons with a classical computer very tricky.

The electrons of the COVID-19 virus, for example, must be treated in general as being part of a single entity having many degrees of freedom, and the description of this ensemble cannot be divided into the sum of its individual, distinguishable electrons. The electrons, due to their strong correlations, have lost their individuality and must be treated as a whole. So to solve the equations, you need to take into account all of the electrons simultaneously. Although classical computers can in principle simulate such molecules, every multi-electron configuration must be stored in memory separately.

Lets say you have a molecule with only 10 electrons (forget the rest of the atom for now), and each electron can be in two different positions within the molecule. Essentially, you have 2^10=1024 different configurations to keep track of rather just 10 electrons which would have been the case if the electrons were individual, distinguishable entities. Youd need 1024 classical bits to store the state of this molecule. Quantum computers, on the other hand, have quantum bits (qubits), which can be made to strongly correlate with one another in the same way electrons within molecules do. So in principle, you would need only about 10 such qubits to represent the strongly correlated electrons in this model system.

The exponentially large parameter space of electron configurations in molecules is exactly the space qubits naturally occupy. Thus, qubits are much more adapted to the simulation of quantum phenomena. This scaling difference between classical and quantum computation gets very big very quickly. For instance, simulating penicillin, a molecule with 41 atoms (and many more electrons) will require 10^86 classical bits, or more bits than the number of atoms in the universe. With a quantum computer, you would only need about 286 qubits. This is still far more qubits than we have today, but certainly a more reasonable and achievable number.The COVID-19 virus outer spike protein, for comparison, contains many thousands of atoms and is thus completely intractable for classical computation. The size of proteins makes them intractable to classical simulation with any degree of accuracy even on todays most powerful supercomputers. Chemists and pharma companies do simulate molecules with supercomputers (albeit not as large as the proteins), but they must resort to making very rough molecule models that dont capture the details a full simulation would, leading to large errors in estimation.

It might take several decades until a sufficiently large quantum computer capable of simulating molecules as large as proteins will emerge. But when such a computer is available, it will mean a complete revolution in the way the pharma and the chemical industries operate.

The holy grail end-to-end in-silico drug discovery involves evaluating and breaking down the entire chemical structures of the virus and the cure.

The continued development of quantum computers, if successful, will allow for end-to-end in-silico drug discovery and the discovery of procedures to fabricate the drug. Several decades from now, with the right technology in place, we could move the entire process into a computer simulation, allowing us to reach results with amazing speed. Computer simulations could eliminate 99.9% of false leads in a fraction of the time it now takes with in-vitro methods. With the appearance of a new epidemic, scientists could identify and develop a potential vaccine/drug in a matter of days.

The bottleneck for drug development would then move from drug discovery to the human testing phases including toxicity and other safety tests. Eventually, even these last stage tests could potentially be expedited with the help of a large scale quantum computer, but that would require an even greater level of quantum computing than described here. Tests at this level would require a quantum computer with enough power to contain a simulation of the human body (or part thereof) that will screen candidate compounds and simulate their impact on the human body.

Achieving all of these dreams will demand a continuous investment into the development of quantum computing as a technology. As Prof. Shohini Ghose said in her 2018 Ted Talk: You cannot build a light bulb by building better and better candles. A light bulb is a different technology based on a deeper scientific understanding. Todays computers are marvels of modern technology and will continue to improve as we move forward. However, we will not be able to solve this task with a more powerful classical computer. It requires new technology, more suited for the task.

(Special thanks Dr. Ilan Richter, MD MPH for assuring the accuracy of the medical details in this article.)

Ramon Szmuk is a Quantum Hardware Engineer at Quantum Machines.

Read more here:
Quantum computing will (eventually) help us discover vaccines in days - VentureBeat

Tales of experiments gone wrong are a staple of science fiction, filled with depictions of scientists flexing their abilities and resources for personal reasons. Motives range from a thirst for power to a savior complex stemming from an incident closer to home. The common thread of the latter includes parents doing everything in their power to save their child. When combined with great intellect the ramifications of this drive can be far-reaching.

This is the case in the recent Alex Garland sci-fi limited series Devs, which grapples with free will versus determinism via the overreach of tech companies, and those pulling the strings. Depicting a version of the near future that doesn't look too dissimilar to the current proliferation of controlling Silicon Valley moguls, Devs portrays the development of secret quantum technology and its potential impact on the moral fabric of society. Fitting into a larger narrative of parents, technology, and the loss of a child, CEO Forest (Nick Offerman) sits alongside the likes ofFringe's Walter Bishop (John Noble) and Amy Adams as linguist Louise Banks in Arrival. Trauma implicitly shapes us and informs future actions, which is magnified further when the person suffering is also in possession of the power to change this outcome. Who will play God to save their loved ones?

Spoilers ahead for Devs.

Motives clouded by individual stakes are often more dangerous because it becomes impossible to put any sense of reasoning or distance on a decision that includes an emotional tether. The first episode of Devs reveals that Amaya boss Forest will do anything including murder to protect the secrets being held in the belly of the woodland area of the sprawling tech company campus. A creepy statue of his daughter (also called Amaya) towers over the redwood trees, her hands expectedly cupped as if she is waiting for a giant ball to be tossed toward her.

Midway through the series, it is revealed that Amaya (Amaya Mizuno-Andr), along with Forest's wife Lianne (Georgia King), died in a car accident, which occurred while Lianne was on the phone to her husband, chastising him for calling when they were so close to home. The theme of a scientist using their prowess to alter events to avoid a tragedy is another repeated theme, which Alex Garland's series explores from a quantum physics and philosophical perspective. Forest isn't attempting time travel, but he does want to go back to a version of reality before this incident.

Most people would probably do anything to change a life-altering event like this one. Beyond wishful thinking, this is not something most people can contemplate. However, Forest is reminiscent of Fringe's Walter Bishop in his attempt to save his child. Both men possess the necessary scientific acumen to aid their quest, even if it has wider implications for the nature of existence. Taking on the masculine attribute of fixing things, these two men will alter the fabric of existence to reach a satisfactory solution. In contrast, Louise Banks learns of a language that changes how she perceives time but doesn't use this knowledge to save her heart. The memories peppering Arrival of her sick daughter who died are "recollections" of events that have yet to occur. She has the power to stop this from ever happening, but at what cost?

Hubris is a factor that ensures men like Forest and Walter believe that what they are doing is for the greater good when it only serves themselves. Louise knows her daughter will die and her husband will leave her but chooses to keep her secret and do nothing to change it. She is a time traveler without ever having to time-travel; instead, she is privy to information that could determine how she acts in the present. She takes on a godlike sensibility because she is omniscient a power she uses to stop an intergalactic war but never wields to save her marriage or the child she knows will die from an incurable illness.

"Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it. And I welcome every moment of it," she says without a flicker of regret. As a mother she is going to fight for her child; similarly, she is not going to not have this baby because she knows her life will be cut short. If she does, she will lose every precious second spent with Hannah. Rather, she cherishes their short time together, rather than fighting for a version of events that doesn't and will never exist. It might read as defeatist or selfish, but her heartbreaking choice is full of love for her daughter. If Forest and Walter are adamant about fixing their dilemma, Louise is leaning into the nurturing stereotype of mothers. She cares for her sick daughter rather than finding a cure to an incurable illness.

In Fringe, after Walter's son Peter dies from a genetic disease, he dedicates his time to watching his parallel universe doppelganger, Walternate, attempt to find a cure for his son. Circumstances lead Walter to travel through a portal to this other reality to save the boy who is not his son. He thought this was the right thing, but his stubborn refusal to listen to others has far-reaching and long-term effects that far outweigh the risk he took. Nina Sharp (Blair Brown) and his lab assistant Carla Warren (Jenni Blong) try to stop him, but their attempts are futile Nina loses an arm for her troubles. After Peter's mother sees the boy she thinks Walter has brought back to life, his difficult decision to return him to his world becomes impossible. His arrogance and lies he told thereafter will haunt him throughout the series, testing the bond between father and son further.

Unlike Walter, Forest doesn't believe there is a multi-verse with another version of his family running around; his theory is predicated on one world with one set of events occurring. The Devs team is working on a top-secret quantum computing project that will eventually allow them to see any moment in history. Imagine watching a high-def recorded version of events including the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and Marilyn Monroe sleeping with husband Arthur Miller. Guidelines are put in place to stop violations of privacy (such as the latter) or skipping ahead to events that have yet to happen; however, both rules are broken by various members of the team.

A machine with this capability will put to bed (or prove) countless conspiracy theories; the ripple effect of the secrets this system possesses is huge. In the wrong hands, this computer could be weaponized, and its capacity to be used for an act of tyranny is great. Deciding who holds the power is not a debate in this company because Forest sits at the top of the chain. Nevertheless, his grief ensures his actions are clouded by emotion rather than rational an argument often leveled as a reason why a woman would make a bad leader. Grief is not gendered, and the actions of each protagonist in Devs, Arrival, and Fringe suggest the fathers are far more likely to wield their scientific ability as a battle cry against the circle of life. Forest adds credence to the latter theory because his actions are influenced by the desire to be with his family again, no matter the cost.

An underlying debate throughout Devs is whether we have free will or not. Forest is firmly on the deterministic side of the argument, believing everything is predetermined. His family was always going to die in that car accident, he was always going to make the phone call that distracted his wife. This takes away his responsibility and assuages his guilt while giving him hope he can be reunited with them in some form.

Rather than placing all bets on the afterlife, his computer exists as his personal time machine, sending him back to before his world changed. At first, it lets him watch his daughter as he remembered her blowing bubbles and playing, but it is much more than a sophisticated DVR player with every moment in history available to binge-watch.

For Forest to successfully bring his plan to fruition he needs to ensure his secret does not get out. Similarly, any theory that suggests he is incorrect is in opposition to his endgame and that person will also have to go which is why Lyndon (Cailee Spaeny) is fired. In Episode 5, Garland portrays multiple versions of the timeline; in some, the crash never happened, in others it did but it was less severe. If this was indeed the case, free will is still on the table, and therefore these deaths were preventable. Lily tossing the gun out of the lift reveals his hypothesis is incorrect, even if he ultimately gets his happy ending. The complexity of this powerful machine is not lost on the other workers who have conflicting theories and cannot risk what will happen if Forest maintains power over it.

"If Ex Machina is about a man who is trying to act as if he's God via technology and science, I thought there's a companion story, which is about people not trying to act as if they're God, but trying to create God," Alex Garland explained in a recent interview with Rolling Stone. Forest still thinks he can use his resources to bend the fabric of existence to his whim, but he is reframing his role, not as creator but as a martyr to the machine he dies to enter. He also tells Lily in the finale that Devs is a cheeky play on the Latin word "Deus," which means deity or God. The gold production design is also an homage to a different form of creation, a location Garland calls a "strange, twilight, gold, womb-space." Family is the big driving force and linking back to biology further emphasizes this, even if Forest's resurrection of his deceased loved ones is far from a natural event in human evolution.

In this sampling of TV and film scientists using their abilities to alter the fabric of reality or leaning into their fate, the gender line is drawn dividing fathers who will literally destroy the matter of all things, and a mother who has accepted her future without defying quantum physics. However, in the recent season of Outlander, Claire Fraser (Caitriona Balfe) uses her skills as a physician and knowledge of life-saving treatments beyond simple tips and tricks. In "discovering" penicillin over a century before it was actually discovered, she is playing God and her hubris is comparable to Forest and Walter's. The impact her choices have on the future is minimal so far, but in Season 5 this looks set to change. This hasn't been done to save her daughter, but rather it shows how deeply conflicted she is as a doctor flung out of time and underscores her nurturing abilities that exist beyond her role as a mother.

Possessing the knowledge from a future timeline to save lives is one conundrum, but these narratives demonstrate it is far more complex when your own flesh and blood are in peril. As Devs and Fringe suggest, even time and space cannot stand in the way of this moral quandary when a figure is willing to play God. Not every expert will rip a hole in the world under the banner of being a parent (and that's OK).

See original here:
Playing God and parental drive in Devs, Fringe and Arrival - SYFY WIRE

Nearly three months after 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was gunned down while jogging in Georgia, the men alleged to have ended his life now face murder charges. As the case sparks outrage and protests, a cadre of gun violence prevention activists are gearing up to take on what they call an overlooked culprit: the stand your ground laws that critics have decried as a low-cost license to kill.

The original prosecutor on Arberys case, George Barnhill, pointed to Georgias stand your ground law as one of the reasons he refused to pursue charges against Gregory McMichael, 64, and Travis McMichael, 32. Seeing Arbery, a frequent runner, jogging through their neighborhood and suspecting him of recent robberies, the father and son reportedly followed the younger black man, confronted him, and fatally shot him after a brief struggle. Another man, Bryan William, recorded the incident on video. Under stand your ground, a person facing a perceived threat has no duty to retreat, and may claim legal protections if they employ deadly force.

This is not something that was written in the Constitution. The founding fathers didnt include stand your ground, said Amber Goodwin, founding director of the Community Justice Action Fund (CJAF). Someone sat in a room and made these laws up. We need to get in a room and out in the streets and demand that the law be changed.

On May 12, CJAF worked with Amnesty International and Cities United to organize a virtual meeting during which the groups detailed their strategy for making that happen. Through an email push, the group is asking people in the 25 states with stand your ground laws to write to their local lawmakers, urging them to support repeals. By June, the group will identify the places where they have the best chance for success. Nevada is the only state with a stand your ground law, a Democratic governor, and at least one Democratic-led legislative chamber.

Goodwin founded CJAF in 2016 to create a gun violence prevention organization led by people of color and focused on the everyday shootings that disproportionately kill and injure young black men. So far, much of the groups work has concentrated on securing financial support for community gun violence intervention programs. Arberys death prompted the group to pivot to a sweeping fight for legislative reform.

In a time where being safe in your neighborhood is such an emphasis, said Greg Jackson, national advocacy director at CJAF, [Arberys death] amplifies the danger of just jogging a few steps from your own home.

Jackson argues that stand your ground led to Arberys fatal encounter with his accused killers. Gregory McMichael, who watched as his son allegedly shot Arbery, was a former police officer. You had someone who seemed very versed in the law that was part of law enforcement, Jackson said. Its hard for me to believe they didnt know how these laws work and how this would play out. The local authorities did not make an arrest in Arberys death until May 7, two days after footage of the incident was made public.

Stand your ground provides the McMichaels with an option for contesting the charges against them.

It appears Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael, and Bryan William were following, in hot pursuit, a burglary suspect, with solid first hand probable cause, in their neighborhood, and asking/telling him to stop, Barnhill wrote in a letter explaining his decision to not bring charges. Citing the states stand your ground law, he wrote that Travis McMichael had no duty to retreat once he engaged Arbery.

Stand your ground laws are relatively new, with Florida enacting the nations first in 2005. The statutes apply a novel interpretation of the centuries-old Castle Doctrine which holds that a person may use lethal force to protect their castle, or home to public spaces. The spread of the laws has had deadly consequences. According to research summarized by the RAND Corporation, Florida saw a 32 percent increase in firearm homicides after stand your ground laws were enacted there.

Its a slippery slope, because these laws broaden the scope of Castle Doctrine and extend it to any confrontation anywhere, said Tishara Jones, treasurer of the city of St. Louis and a supporter of CJAF. Her home state of Missouri adopted its own stand your ground law in 2016.

In [Arberys] case, they hunted this man down and shot him in broad daylight, Jones said.

Arberys death has echoes of the killing of Trayvon Martin, which first brought stand your ground laws to wider attention. Martin, 17, was pursued by George Zimmerman, an armed man who suspected him of being a criminal. A jury decided that Zimmerman was justified in shooting Martin during the ensuing confrontation, an acquittal that helped birth the Black Lives Matter movement.

State lawmakers are scrambling to respond to COVID-19 and overhaul their budgets in the face of crashing tax revenues, which could hamper any immediate legislative push. Of the states with stand your ground laws, only Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have full time legislatures that meet throughout the year.

The push to repeal stand your ground laws will also have to contend with the support they continue to enjoy among many Republican lawmakers. A proposal in Ohio would create the countrys newest stand your ground law, but its been stuck in committee. After the laws momentum stalled in the years following the Trayvon Martin case, they were passed in Missouri, Utah, Idaho, and Iowa, where a young black legislator donned a hoodie on the floor of the State Capitol in an unsuccessful plea to block the bill.

Read more:
Ahmaud Arbery Shooting Ignites Fight to Repeal Stand Your Ground Laws - The Trace