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House Republicans Target Biden Administration on COVID Vaccine Mandates + More
House Republicans Target Biden Administration on COVID Vaccine Mandates
A GOP-led House subcommittee is demanding answers about how President Biden’s controversial COVID-19 vaccine mandates came to be.
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic sent letters Tuesday to the Office of Personnel Management and the Departments of Defense, Labor, and Health and Human Services demanding documentation showing how the requirements originated and evolved.
“The Biden Administration disregarded medical freedom, patient-physician relationships, and clear scientific standards to force a novel vaccine on millions of Americans without sufficient evidence to support their policies,” subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) told The Post.
Requested information includes material informing the decisions behind the mandates, internal communications about the vaccine, draft versions of the requirements, data about its implementation, and more. The panel is demanding that information by Aug. 15.
New Orleans’ Facial Recognition Systems Led to Exactly Zero Arrests in Nine Months
Police in New Orleans have been using facial recognition for the better part of a year, but the tech hasn’t had much of an impact on the city’s violent crime crisis. NOLA’s recently published quarterly public safety review, compiled by city consultant Datalytics, shows that during a nine-month period — between October 1, 2022, and July 1, 2023 — there were “no arrests of an individual matched by facial recognition.”
In other words: face recording has helped cops catch zero crooks. The data to back up that unfortunate assessment comes from the NOPD itself.
Facial recognition, which uses sophisticated cameras to scan people’s faces and compare their attributes to those of known criminal offenders, has been hailed by law enforcement as an essential tool for catching violent criminals. But questions remain about the technology’s accuracy and effectiveness, and privacy advocates have broadly decried the tool for its dystopian impact on society.
Amazon Bets Big on Virtual Care, Unveils Nationwide Telehealth Service Through Its Website, Mobile App
Amazon Clinic is expanding to all 50 states, including nationwide telehealth services to offer access to clinicians through its website and mobile app.
The online retail giant unveiled Amazon Clinic back in November as a virtual medical clinic to provide care for 35 common health concerns like urinary tract infections, pink eye, and acid reflux. Launched as a message-based virtual consultation service, Amazon Clinic connects consumers with licensed clinicians who can diagnose, treat and prescribe medication for a range of common health and lifestyle conditions.
The service was available in 34 states and has now been expanded nationwide and to Washington, DC, along with the addition of video visits with providers on Amazon.com and the mobile app, the company announced in a blog post on Tuesday.
Amazon Clinic is currently cash pay and does not yet accept insurance, the company said.
FBI Ordered to Find Out Which Agency Disobeyed White House in Secret Deal, Finds Out It Was Itself
Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that an unknown federal agency had breached official White House policy and used secretive methods to conduct a business deal with the NSO Group, a blacklisted spyware vendor known for selling powerful surveillance tools.
The agency in question not only brazenly disobeyed the government’s official policy, but also used a front company to facilitate the deal, suggesting that it knew what was happening was not exactly kosher.
After the Times’ story was published, the FBI was ordered by the Biden administration to investigate. Now, several months later, the bureau’s investigation is complete, and it turns out that the agency that disobeyed the White House and purchased the creepy NSO tool was … the FBI.
Yes, the New York Times now reports that the bureau has admitted that it was the mystery agency at the center of the controversy several months back. However, America’s top law enforcement agency is also trying to explain away its involvement, claiming that it was somehow duped into the deal without any knowledge of what was going on.
Former Upstate Hospital Worker Who Refused COVID Shot Sues NY to Reverse Firing
An Upstate hospital attendant who refused in 2021 to get a COVID-19 vaccine on religious grounds spent two years fighting to keep his job. Oleg Sidorchuk, 37, of Van Buren, lost that fight, and his job, in April.
Then in May, the state dropped its vaccination mandate for workers at all hospitals. Upstate University Hospital has since allowed the hiring of non-vaccinated workers, a spokesman said.
Now Sidorchuk’s union, the Civil Service Employees Association, is suing Upstate on his behalf. The union filed a lawsuit last week seeking to have a state Supreme Court Justice overturn his firing and award him back pay for the two years he was suspended without pay.
More Than 100 Colleges Are Still Enforcing Vaccine Mandates: Report
More than 100 colleges and universities are still enforcing COVID vaccine mandates for students — some three years out from the start of the pandemic.
A report from No College Mandates lists 104 colleges and universities still requiring COVID vaccinations, including Harvard University, Johns Hopkins, Rutgers University, DePauw University, Sarah Lawrence College, University of Pittsburgh and San Diego State University.
According to COVID policies outlined on some of these schools’ websites, staff and faculty are sometimes required to be vaccinated, too, The Daily Wire has reviewed. Additionally, some of the schools permit religious or medical exemptions.
No College Mandates brands itself as a group of “concerned parents, doctors, nurses, professors, students and other college stakeholders working towards the common goal of ending COVID-19 vaccine mandates.” The site has additionally compiled a list of more than 1,200 schools with details on specific COVID vaccine policies.
Some colleges and universities have only recently discontinued their vaccine requirements. For example, 64 New York state schools, all part of the SUNY system, dropped the COVID vaccine mandate in April of this year.
Shots Fired: Twitter Explores Lawsuit Against Pro-Censorship Operatives
Twitter parent company X Corp is exploring a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a U.K.-based dark money nonprofit run by a far-left British Labour Party operative named Imran Ahmed.
Earlier this month journalist Paul Thacker dropped a Twitter files exposé via The Disinformation Chronicle in which we learn that pre-Musk Twitter employees took action against several conservative accounts after the CCDH released a report alleging that just 12 accounts produced the majority of anti-vaccine disinformation on social media.
Facebook, meanwhile, rejected the report, saying in a statement that “There isn’t any evidence to support this claim.” A similar lack of evidence underpins a July 20 letter from “X” attorneys to CCDH and its CEO, Ahmed, which it accused of targeting Twitter with multiple unfounded accusations in an attempt to hurt the company financially.
Meta Is Reportedly Preparing to Release AI-Powered Chatbots With Different Personas
Meta is gearing up to roll out AI-powered chatbots with different personas as early as next month, according to a new report from the Financial Times. The chatbots are designed to have humanlike conversations with users on Meta’s social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.
The Financial Times notes that in addition to boosting engagement, the chatbots also have the potential to collect new amounts of data on users, which could help Meta better target users with relevant content and ads. Given this possibility, the chatbots are likely to raise privacy concerns.
Pandemic Set Back Social and Emotional Growth of Children in England, Study Finds
Half of all children suffered a setback to their emotional and social development during the first year of the pandemic, with younger siblings more likely to have been negatively affected than their older brothers and sisters, according to a survey of parents.
Children from all economic backgrounds in England were affected, the research found, though those aged four to seven were significantly more likely to have suffered a deterioration in their skills than 12- to 15-year-olds.
Youngsters whose parents’ employment changed as a result of the pandemic, including those who were furloughed, were also far more likely to see their social and emotional skills worsen, the report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said.
This latest study looks instead at the impact of parents’ experiences in the labor market on their children’s social and emotional development and finds that children from wealthier as well as poorer families have seen their social and emotional development adversely affected.
Meta Says It Will Offer Europeans a Free Choice to Deny Tracking
Meta is bowing to legal inevitability in the European Union: It’s just announced it will finally comply with regional privacy regulations by giving users a free choice to deny its behavioral advertising.
The tech giant is subject to an ongoing regulatory procedure over the legal basis it claims to run microtargeted ads which had been expected to conclude around the middle of this month. But in an update to a blog post today it announced its “intention” to switch to a consent-based legal basis for targeted advertising.
Its blog post does not include a date for when it expects to make this change — with the company offering nothing more specific than a vague reference to “the months ahead” — but of course, the exact compliance timeline is not in Meta’s gift; it will be up to EU regulators to decide.
AI May Take Over Doctors’ Tasks Sooner Than Thought: Gottlieb + More
AI May Take Over Doctors’ Tasks Sooner Than Thought: Gottlieb
Former U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said artificial intelligence (AI) could take over tasks from doctors sooner rather than later.
“The inevitable question isn’t so much if but when these artificial intelligence devices can step into the shoes of doctors. For some tasks, this medical future is sooner than we think,” Gottlieb wrote in an opinion piece published with CNBC.
Gottlieb said AI tools in healthcare are split into two categories: machine learning, which utilizes algorithms to allow systems to “learn patterns from data and make predictions,” and natural language processing, which understands and creates human language.
In a few cases, Gottlieb said large language models are analyzing a patient’s medical records and providing diagnoses and treatments directly to the patient without a physician involved.
“The biggest hurdle may well be establishing a suitable regulatory path,” Gottlieb wrote. “Regulators are hesitant, fearing that the models are prone to errors and that the clinical data sets on which they’re trained contain wrong decisions, leading to AI models to replicate these medical mistakes.”
Pediatrician Fired After Raising Alarm on COVID Vaccines During U.S. Senate Event
A medical expert was terminated by one of her employers after raising concerns about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines during an event held by a U.S. senator, according to newly disclosed documents.
After Dr. Renata Moon (who will appear on “American Thought Leaders” premiering Aug. 30, 7:30 p.m. ET) testified during the December 2022 event on Capitol Hill, Washington State University officials told her that they were alerting a state medical commission because she allegedly promoted misinformation, one of the documents shows.
The Washington Medical Commission (WMC) has said that doctors who offer misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and preventative measures “erode the public trust in the medical profession and endanger patients,” that people should lodge complaints against doctors who allegedly provide misinformation, and that it may revoke the licenses of doctors who are found to have spread misinformation.
Drs. Jeff Haney and James Record, Washington State University officials, referenced the commission in a letter to Dr. Moon dated March 3.
“The WMC has asked the public and practitioners to report possible spread of misinformation. There are components of your presentation that could be interpreted as a possible spread,” they wrote. “As such, we are ethically obligated to make a report to the WMC to investigate possible breach of this expectation.”
The university informed Dr. Moon in June that it was effectively firing her by not renewing her appointment as a clinical associate professor of medicine, according to other documents reviewed by The Epoch Times.
“At this time, the needs of the college are moving in a different direction and your participation is no longer required,” Drs. Haney and Record wrote. More detailed reasoning was not provided.
“This is not about my personal situation with the school. This is about freedom of speech for all Americans,” Dr. Moon told The Epoch Times in an email.
“We must create an ethical healthcare system that is concerned only with the well being of individual patients and not the financial interests of massive corporations. We are dealing with conflicts of interest that are larger than any of us ever imagined.”
FBI Says AI Is Making It Easier for Hackers to Write Malware
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has declared that artificial intelligence is helping almost every aspect of cybercriminal activity from development to deployment, and the trend looks to be heading in only one direction.
Speaking on a recent media call, an FBI official indicated that free, customizable open source models are proving increasingly popular among hackers trying to spread malware, conduct phishing attacks and carry out other types of scams.
There has also been a considerable increase in the number of hacker-made AI writers which have been purpose-built to target vulnerable Internet users.
AI’s Scariest Mystery
As tech companies begin to weave artificial intelligence (AI) into all their products and all of our lives, the architects of this revolutionary technology often can’t predict or explain their systems’ behavior.
Why it matters: This may be the scariest aspect of today’s AI boom — and it’s common knowledge among AI’s builders, though not widely understood by everyone else.
“It is not at all clear — not even to the scientists and programmers who build them — how or why the generative language and image models work,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp wrote recently in The New York Times.
It’s still an open question whether AI makers will be able, over time, to provide deeper and better answers for why and how their systems work.
But the more companies build AI that can legibly document its choices and decision paths, the more likely we are to get those answers.
Meet the Company Trying to Control Your Mind
There’s a group of people who control what you are allowed to see — the news you read, the videos you watch, the posts you engage with.
You haven’t heard of them. You don’t know their names, but they determine, through methods both direct and indirect, whether you are allowed to be exposed to particular messages. Their decisions can bankrupt companies, silence voices and fundamentally shift cultural norms. Who are these people and how do they do this?
Well, at the top level you have a network of global elites who have created a universal framework full of guidelines and ratings designed to enforce “approved” narratives and punish disapproved ones. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, except it isn’t a secret and we’re not guessing.
First, you have the World Economic Forum, the WEF, and their platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment and culture. Second, you have the World Federation of Advertisers, the WFA, who represent mega-corporations that control 90% of global advertising dollars. WFA members are a who’s who of global business and include some of our recent wokeified favorites like Bud Light’s parent company AB InBev, Hershey, Procter & Gamble, Lego and Disney.
There is barely a billionaire Fortune 500 CEO, heavyweight philanthropist, government, or woke nonprofit that isn’t associated with the WEF or the WFA.
In 2019, the WFA established the Global Alliance for Responsible Media or GARM. Within months, the WEF adopted GARM as part of its platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment and culture. GARM is a cross-industry alliance that brings these mega-corporations — the advertisers — together with big tech companies like Meta who owns Facebook and Instagram, Google owned YouTube, the CCP’s TikTok and even Snapchat and Pinterest.
This unholy alliance created something they call the Brand Safety Floor & Suitability Framework.
Facebook Took Down COVID Posts After Pressure From the Biden Administration. ‘I Can’t See Mark in a Million Years Being Comfortable With That,’ an Exec Said in Newly Uncovered Emails.
When the White House urged Facebook to clamp down on content regarding COVID-19 — including misinformation or jokes about vaccines — some executives at the company thought CEO Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t be happy.
The Biden administration pushed Facebook, now under the parent company Meta, to take down content about COVID-19, including theories about its origin and satire about the vaccines being unsafe, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing internal emails and communications.
The report indicates that the Big Tech company gave into many demands, despite some executives pushing back and saying Zuckerberg wouldn’t be on board, the Journal reported.
“I can’t see Mark in a million years being comfortable with removing that — and I wouldn’t recommend it,” said Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs at the time, in an email regarding the Biden administration’s request to take down humorous content about the vaccine, the WSJ reported.
The Tricky Truth About How Generative AI Uses Your Data + More
The Tricky Truth About How Generative AI Uses Your Data
When the White House revealed its list of voluntary safety and societal commitments signed by seven artificial intelligence (AI) companies, one thing was noticeably missing: anything related to the data these AI systems collect and use to train this powerful technology. Including, very likely, yours.
There are many concerns about the potential harm that sophisticated generative AI systems have unleashed on the public. What they do with our data is one of them.
We know very little about where these models get the petabytes of data they need, how that data is being used and what protections, if any, are in place when it comes to sensitive information. The companies that make these systems aren’t telling us much, and may not even know themselves.
You may be okay with all of this, or think the good that generative AI can do far outweighs whatever bad went into building it. But a lot of other people aren’t.
Jim Jordan Unleashes ‘The Facebook Files’: Social Media Giant ‘Censored Americans Because of Biden White House Pressure’
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) released internal Meta documents on Thursday that he said were evidence of the White House improperly pressuring Facebook and Instagram into censoring posts.
The congressman said in a thread posted to X that he was unveiling “Part 1” of “The Facebook Files” — which appears to be a nod to the “Twitter Files” — obtained by his panel only after he threatened to move forward with holding Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress. Jordan said that plan is being placed on hold unless the Big Tech giant stops cooperating with his investigation.
Jordan’s thread, which he said involved “smoking-gun” documents that “prove Facebook censored Americans because of Biden White House pressure,” contained some screenshots of the documents, but not the full correspondence.
“Never-before-released internal documents subpoenaed by the Judiciary Committee PROVE that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies because of unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House,” Jordan began.
“During the first half of 2021, social media companies like Facebook faced tremendous pressure from the Biden White House — both publicly and privately — to crack down on alleged ‘misinformation,’” Jordan said.
The ESRB Has Begun Work On ‘Facial Age Verification’ Tech for Age Checks
The video games rating board, known and referred to as the Entertainment Software Rating Board or ESRB, has proposed the implementation of a new age verification tech that would use facial age assurance to gain parental consent.
As reported by Eurogamer, the Entertainment Software Rating Board is suggesting using such a means in order that parental consent is gained in accordance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA).
The proposed tech would see the deployment of what the ESRB is calling “Privacy-Protective Facial Age Estimation” which would scan faces to verify the age of a parent.
This is due to COPPA stating that services in the U.S. must have parental consent when obtaining the personal information of anyone under the age of 13. The tech has been developed with digital ID platform, Yoti and SuperAwesome which specializes in online safety tech for children.
Anything that is going to scan faces for data and seemingly retain the information — for initial verification purposes only or not — is likely to raise alarm bells. I, for one, am not a huge fan of the idea of a tech company scanning my face to check my age.
Senate Panel Advances Bills to Childproof the Internet
Congress is closer than ever to passing a pair of bills to childproof the internet after lawmakers voted to send them to the floor Thursday.
The bills — the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and COPPA 2.0 — were approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday by a unanimous voice vote. Both pieces of legislation aim to address an ongoing mental health crisis amongst young people that some lawmakers blame social media for intensifying.
But critics of the bills have long argued that they have the potential to cause more harm than good, like forcing social media platforms to collect more user information to properly enforce Congress’ rules.
In his past two State of the Union addresses, President Joe Biden has insisted that Congress enact stronger online privacy protections for children. Taking a cue from the president in recent years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have rolled out legislation to address his concerns. Obviously, the two bills passed Thursday have come out on top.
AWS Launches New Healthcare-Focused Services, Powered by Generative AI
Amazon is expanding its range of health-focused apps and services with a platform that offers artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help clinicians transcribe and analyze their conversations with patients.
At its annual AWS Summit conference in New York, Amazon unveiled AWS HealthScribe, an API to create transcripts, extract details and create summaries from doctor-patient discussions that can be entered into an electronic health record system.
The transcripts from HealthScribe can be converted into patient notes by the platform’s machine learning models, Amazon says, which can then be analyzed for broad insights.
Amazon says that the AI capabilities in HealthScribe are powered by Bedrock, its platform that provides a way to build generative AI-powered apps via pretrained models from startups as well as Amazon itself. This might be cause for alarm, given generative AI’s tendency to exhibit biases, confidently invent facts and generally go off the rails.
Speech recognition algorithms, too, often contain biases.
One recent study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that speech recognition systems from leading tech companies were twice as likely to incorrectly transcribe audio from Black speakers as opposed to white speakers.
As a piece in Scientific American points out, in normal conversations, we might choose to “code-switch” depending on the audience. But there’s no code-switching with automated speech recognition programs — either you assimilate, or you’re not understood.
So is HealthScribe consistent? Can it be trusted, particularly when it comes to deciding whether to label a part of a discussion as “subjective” or “objective” or identifying medications? And can it handle the wide array of different accents and vernaculars that patients and providers might use?
The jury’s out on all that.
Senators Sound Alarm Over US Funding to Chinese Biotech Firm Over National Security Threats
A group of Republican senators are probing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) over its partnership with Chinese biotech firm BGI, warning that the collaboration could give China a competitive edge while putting U.S. security in danger.
The Chinese genomics giant, which has been blacklisted by both the Defense and Commerce Departments, has been working with the USDA since as early as 2018 on the Earth BioGenome Project, which aims to sequence the genomes of over 1.5 million species over a 10-year span to catalog the earth’s biodiversity.
Following the partnership’s announcement, the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service awarded $1 million to BGI. The Chinese firm and the state-funded China National GeneBank it runs occupy leadership roles in four of the project’s nine subcommittees, including chairmanship of the subcommittee of IT and Informatics.
The lawmakers said they are “gravely concerned” about BGI’s participation in this “massive effort to sequence all of life,” a partnership they said was uncovered while tracking U.S. government funding during a probe into COVID-19 origins.
Watch: RFK Jr. Blasts Public Health Agencies for Endorsing Mass Lockdowns + More
Watch: RFK Jr. Blasts Public Health Agencies for Endorsing Mass Lockdowns
Speaking during a town hall style interview Tuesday, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slammed public heath agencies for going along with the government in implementing mass lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic.
RFK Jr. told the crowd that the actions were completely antithetical to the established course of action that should be taken during such an event.
“What they were doing violated all of the orthodoxy,” Kennedy noted, adding “We’ve had the WHO [World Health Organization], CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], the DHS [U.S. Department of Homeland Security], and all the three-letter agencies have thought about pandemics for a hundred years. And they’ve worked on very, very carefully on pandemic preparedness protocols. And all of those protocols said you never lock down a population.”
“You cannot stop a respiratory virus with lockdowns. You’re going to actually amplify it, because they spread indoors,” Kennedy continued, citing historic medical papers that long ago criticized lockdown measures as a means of mitigating the spread of viruses.
“And what all the orthodox protocols said is that you quarantine the sick, you protect the vulnerable, and then you let the population continue. Because, when you shut down businesses, that kills people. Unemployment kills people,” RFK Jr. further urged.
Parents Are Using AirTags to Track Kids Too Young for a Phone
Stephanie Chin can always find her daughter. Between school, activities and friends, her 8-year-old’s busy schedule takes her to various locations away from the family’s Virginia home. At any time, Chin and her husband can open their smartphones to see their child’s recent location on a map. They’re getting it from two Apple AirTags tucked deep in her backpack.
Chin is one of many parents and caregivers using tracking devices to keep tabs on children old enough to wander away but too young for a phone.
Adults are putting trackers in backpacks, on bikes or directly on kids for extra accuracy. Online, companies sell hundreds of colorful tracker holders for children including wristbands, keychains, lanyards and pins. Some caregivers sew them into jackets or tie them to shoes to protect them from their chaotic hosts.
When Apple released AirTags in 2021, the company clearly stated that they were not to be used for children or pets, only inanimate objects. The small print isn’t stopping people. In addition to children, caregivers are using them for people with dementia or Alzheimer’s, and pet owners are putting them in custom cat and dog collars.
However it’s done, tracking kids is a sensitive subject. Is it surveillance-culture gone overboard, a smart hack for managing a busy family, or a way to claw back some of the freedom previous generations had that’s missing?
Pentagon-Funded Study Uses AI to Detect ‘Violations of Social Norms’ in Text
New research funded by the Pentagon suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) can scan and analyze blocks of text to discern whether the humans who wrote it have done something wrong or not.
The paper, written by two researchers at Ben-Gurion University, leverages predictive models that can analyze messages for what they call “social norm violations.”
To do this, researchers used GPT-3 (a programmable large language model created by OpenAI that can automate content creation and analysis), along with a method of data parsing known as zero-shot text classification, to identify broad categories of “norm violations” in text messages.
In essence, the research seems to be yet another form of sentiment analysis — an already fairly well-traversed area of the surveillance industrial complex. It’s also yet another sign that AI will inexorably be used to broaden the U.S. defense community’s powers, with decidedly alarming results.
AI at Some Subway Stations to Track When and How Fare Evaders Are Getting Through
The next time you walk through the turnstile at a New York City subway station, artificial intelligence (AI) might be watching you.
The city’s subway system is now using AI surveillance technology to track fare evasion. The AI integrates with existing camera infrastructure in stations to monitor video feeds in real time, providing 24/7 data on when and how people are getting onto the subway without paying.
Though the technology is currently only in use at seven stations across the city, NYC’s Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA) plans to expand its use to two dozen more stations by the end of the year.
An MTA spokesperson declined to tell Insider which stations the technology is in use at or those that it plans on expanding to.
Even OpenAI Can’t Tell the Difference Between Original Content and AI-Generated Content — and That’s Worrying
Did a bot write this article? We’ll never know!
Open AI, the creator of the incredibly popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, has officially shut down the tool it had developed for detecting content created by AI and not humans. ‘AI Classifier’ has been scrapped just six months after its launch – apparently due to a ‘low rate of accuracy’, says OpenAI in a blog post.
ChatGPT has exploded in popularity this year, worming its way into every aspect of our digital lives, with a slew of rival services and copycats.
Of course, the flood of AI-generated content does bring up concerns from multiple groups surrounding inaccurate, inhuman content pervading our social media and newsfeeds.
Educators in particular are troubled by the different ways ChatGPT has been used to write essays and assignments that are passed off as original work.
UNESCO Is Calling for a Global Ban on Smartphones in Schools
Smartphones are doing more harm than good, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) believes.
UNESCO believes smartphones should be banned from schools, as they distract students and don’t really contribute to the learning process.
The UN’s educational organization has launched a global new report on technology in education, calling for governments around the world to regulate its use.
Called, “Technology in education: A tool on whose terms?” the report argues that when used in excess, or without the presence of a qualified teacher, any benefits technology in the classroom might have — disappear.
“The digital revolution holds immeasurable potential but, just as warnings have been voiced for how it should be regulated in society, similar attention must be paid to the way it is used in education. Its use must be for enhanced learning experiences and for the well-being of students and teachers, not to their detriment,” warns Audrey Azoulay, Director General of UNESCO.
The Vast Surveillance Network That Traps Thousands of Disabled Medicaid Recipients
Technology is perpetuating discrimination.
In Arkansas, the Guardian reported on a disabled Medicaid recipient who depleted his savings to pay for a smartphone for his Medicaid-covered caregiver — and then had to pay even more to cover caregiver wages that were withheld due to technical glitches.
In Ohio, the Mighty reported on someone who placed the electronic device meant to certify his caregiver’s activities in the refrigerator when not in use because he was concerned about privacy.
And throughout the U.S., other outlets have reported on disabled people who have been forced to share photographs and biometric data with third-party apps if they want to continue receiving government support to pay for their in-home care.