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The Future of AI Is Finally Here — and a Lot of People Are Going to Be Out of a Job
For years, folks have been talking about the coming AI revolution, about how it’s going to change everything and about how it is going to cost a lot of people their jobs. Well, the future is now — and if you are a business leader, you need to start dealing with it today.
Last week, marketeer Zain Kahn asked the AI to perform the same series of tasks that an employee at a marketing firm might be asked to undertake for a client: create an SEO strategy for a website, develop a list of target keywords, write a content strategy for the website, develop 10 blog ideas, then write one of those blogs itself. He even asked the AI to create metadata and simple code for the website to optimize it for bilingual search. Then he rated its performance.
“I’d rank it as a 5/10. The equivalent of an SEO marketer with 1-2 years of experience earning around $50k/year. Not excellent, but definitely more competent than an SEO intern,” Kahn wrote on Twitter. “All of this took me 5 minutes. In the real world, all of this would probably take at least 5-10 hours.”
Is it any wonder then that more than a million people signed up to use this experimental AI last week? Every leader should be asking themselves what this means for the future of their business.
Army Captain Separated From Service for Refusing Vaccine as House Passes Bill That Rescinds Military’s Vaccine Mandate
An Army captain was separated from the service for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine as the GOP attempts to roll back Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s military vaccine mandate.
Capt. Stephen Rogerson (a pseudonym) has served in the Army for 17 years, and on Dec. 6, a three-person administrative board voted to separate him from service. On the same day, the House passed an $858 billion defense funding bill, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the fiscal year 2023, that included a provision to rescind the military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
But soldiers like Rogerson are “falling through the cracks of a failed policy at precisely the wrong time,” according to R. Davis Younts, an Air Force Reserve Judge Advocate General (JAG) and civilian attorney.
In October 2021, Rogerson received a temporary medical exemption through his primary care manager. Within two hours of submitting his request for exemption to the vaccine to his command, it was denied.
Fauci Acknowledges Americans Have Mandate ‘Fatigue’: ‘People Don’t Like to Be Told What to Do’
Dr. Anthony Fauci acknowledged Friday that there is a “fatigue” about COVID-19 mandates as respiratory viruses surge across the U.S.
In an interview with Fox 5 New York, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert said that while he believes future decisions about implementing restrictions should be left up to the discretion of local health authorities, he knows that people “don’t like being told what to do.”
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director also told the station that he was concerned about what he called “not a very vigorous uptake” of the Omicron-specific booster.
Health officials in cities nationwide are encouraging residents to embrace mitigation measures — strongly recommending masking in New York and Los Angeles.
Musk Calls to Prosecute Fauci, Drawing Swift Backlash
Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Sunday called to prosecute Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Biden who has led the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic since it started during the Trump administration, and drew swift backlash for his comment.
“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” Musk said on Twitter. He later shared a meme edited to show Fauci telling Biden, “Just one more lockdown, my king.”
Lawmakers and other officials jumped to Fauci’s defense online. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) said Musk “wants to criminalize Anthony Fauci because he disagrees with him” and hit at the Twitter CEO for hypocrisy in his free-speech claims.
“Fauci’s resignation should not prevent a full-throated investigation into the origins of the pandemic. He must be required to testify under oath regarding any discussions he participated in concerning the Wuhan lab leak. His policies destroyed lives,” wrote Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in response to Musk’s post.
Judge Rejects Vaccine Choice Law in Healthcare Settings
A person’s choice to decline vaccinations does not outweigh public health and safety requirements in medical settings, a federal judge ruled in a Montana case.
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy last week permanently blocked a section of law the state said was meant to prevent employers — including many healthcare facilities — from discriminating against workers by requiring them to be vaccinated against communicable diseases, including COVID-19.
The Montana law made it illegal for a person to be denied services, goods or employment based on their vaccine status. The law did not change vaccine requirements at schools or daycare facilities or eliminate a person’s right to seek a religious or medical exemption.
With New Twitter Files, Musk Forces a Free-Speech Reckoning for Politicians and Pundits
“We don’t make exceptions for jokes or satire.” That line from the third tranche of company documents released by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, captures the social media giant’s censorship culture. Its humorless, officious tenor is all too common with state censors throughout history. Censorship creates an insatiable appetite for more censorship, where even jokes become intolerable.
These latest Twitter files shatter past denials of “shadow banning” and other suppression techniques targeting disfavored viewpoints. That includes denials by former CEO Jack Dorsey under oath before Congress and public denials by top corporate executives. The legal ramifications will become clearer as more information emerges. Yet, a far more significant problem already is confirmed in these files: the existential threat of corporate censors to free speech.
In the new material released late Friday, journalist Matt Taibbi confirmed that Twitter executives met weekly with FBI, Homeland Security and national intelligence officials to discuss “disinformation” they felt should be removed from the site. Those discussions apparently included the Hunter Biden laptop story.
You don’t need a state ministry of information if the media voluntarily maintains official narratives and suppresses dissenting views. And what emerges from these files is the notion of an effective state media in America — an alliance of media, business and political figures who act, not out of government compulsion, but out of personal conviction.
Judge Fast-Tracks Rumble’s Lawsuit Against New York’s Online Censorship Law
New York State lawmakers passed a law requiring online platforms to address “hateful” content posted by users.
Last week, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) teamed up with Rumble and filed a lawsuit challenging the law, which took effect on December 3. A federal judge has fast-tracked the briefing and set a teleconference for December 19.
Failure to comply with the law results in daily fines of up to $1,000 per day. The fine might not be much for Big Tech platforms like YouTube and Facebook. However, the law’s definition of “social media networks” is so broad that it covers a wide range of platforms, apps, sites and forums.
China Scraps Tracking App as Zero-COVID Policy Is Dismantled
China has announced plans to scrap its primary COVID tracking app in the latest rollback of pandemic control measures, just days after abruptly abandoning its long-running zero-COVID policy.
It came as health authorities warned of widespread infections on the horizon, and redeployed hundreds of thousands of doctors and nurses to intensive care units in preparation for an Omicron surge through the population of 1.4 billion people.
On Tuesday, the government-run “communications itinerary card” will be retired, according to an official announcement on Monday. The app tracked people’s movements using mobile phone signals, identifying those who had been in high-risk areas in order to control their travel to other areas.
Some expressed concern about the vast amounts of personal data collected by the app and others like it. “I hope there will be mechanisms and measures to log out and delete this,” said one.
