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Mooney Unveils Bill to Block Central Bank Digital Currency Pilot Program
A growing number of Republican lawmakers are calling to block a central bank digital currency from being issued in the U.S., and Rep. Alex Mooney of West Virginia is the latest to join the chorus.
However, Mooney’s bill, which was introduced in the House on Thursday, is different — he is calling for something called the Digital Dollar Pilot Prevention Act, which aims to prevent the Federal Reserve from launching a pilot program that would test the operability of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the U.S. financial system.
The move would stop the development of a CBDC in its tracks, people inside Mooney’s office tell FOX Business. While anti-CBDC legislation is nothing new, Mooney’s bill attempts to close the pilot program “loophole” that could allow the Federal Reserve to implement a test run of a CBDC without the consent of Congress.
Critics of CBDCs are voicing concerns about increased government surveillance and the intrusion of privacy if the Federal Reserve decides to implement a digital dollar. If money becomes completely digital and is issued and controlled solely by the government, then, critics say, a CBDC would give federal officials control over the money flowing in and out of people’s accounts and a window into sensitive financial data.
Eating Disorder Helpline Takes Down Chatbot After Its Advice Goes Horribly Wrong
AI chatbots aren’t much good at offering emotional support being — you know — not a human, and — it can’t be stated enough — not actually intelligent. That didn’t stop The National Eating Disorder Association from trying to foist a chatbot onto folks requesting aid in times of crisis.
Things went about as well as you can expect, as an activist claims that instead of helping through emotional distress, the chatbot instead tried to needle her to lose weight and measure herself constantly.
NEDA announced on its Instagram page Tuesday it had taken down its Tessa chatbot after it “may have given information that was harmful and unrelated to the program.” The nonprofit meant to provide resources and support for people with eating disorders said it was investigating the situation.
Tessa was meant to replace NEDA’s long-running phone helpline staffed with a few full-time employees and numerous volunteers. Former staff claims they were illegally fired in retaliation for their move to unionize. The helpline is supposed to fully go away on June 1.
Sunak and Biden to Discuss AI After ‘Extinction Risk’ Warning
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has confirmed he will discuss artificial intelligence and the risks it poses when he meets U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington next week.
Sunak made the announcement after several leading figures from the AI industry published a letter on Tuesday that said the technology should be recognized as an “extinction risk” to humanity comparable to “pandemics and nuclear war.”
Referencing his meeting with the heads of OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic last week, as well as recent discussions on AI at the G7, Sunak said the U.K. “can play a leadership role because ultimately, we’re only going to grapple with this problem and solve it if we work together not just with the companies, but with countries around the world.”
TikTok Creators’ Financial Info, Social Security Numbers Have Been Stored in China
Over the past several years, thousands of TikTok creators and businesses around the world have given the company sensitive financial information — including their social security numbers and tax IDs — so that they can be paid by the platform.
But unbeknownst to many of them, TikTok has stored that personal financial information on servers in China that are accessible by employees there, Forbes has learned.
A trove of records obtained by Forbes from multiple sources across different parts of the company reveals that highly sensitive financial and personal information about those prized users and third parties has been stored in China. The discovery also raises questions about whether employees who are not authorized to access that data have been able to. It draws on internal communications, audio recordings, videos, screenshots, documents marked “Privileged and Confidential,” and several people familiar with the matter.
In testimony before Congress earlier this year, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew claimed U.S. user data has been stored on physical servers outside China. “American data has always been stored in Virginia and Singapore in the past, and access of this is on an as-required basis by our engineers globally,” he said under oath at a House hearing in March.
At 34, Jon Has Incurable Bowel Cancer — All Because the NHS Turned Into a COVID-Only Service
The Telegraph via Yahoo!News reported:
In the spring of 2020, Jon Chapple and a friend were debating lockdown. Jon was pretty vehement. He said he thought it was obvious that shutting down the country, and effectively making the NHS a COVID-only service, was a huge error. It would kill more people than it saved in the long run, Jon told his friend. What Jon didn’t know was that one of the people lockdown would condemn to death would be him.
He’d been referred for a colonoscopy that was supposed to happen in March, but lockdown kiboshed that. The appointment was pushed back until August when a benign polyp was discovered in Jon’s bowel. The consultant said he didn’t have the right tool to take it out (he didn’t mention it was because the growth was so large) but he told Jon he’d get him back in to do it. “It was no big deal, I thought,” recalls Jon.
Jon was diagnosed with bowel cancer, which had spread to the liver, after “two years of wrong diagnoses, delayed appointments and missed opportunities to deal with the disease before it metastasized”. Nikki was with him when a doctor basically told him he wasn’t going to live.
His case is absolutely dreadful, but far from unique. Since the lockdown, it’s estimated that 210,000 patients with cancer have had to wait too long for their treatment.
There Are a Million Reasons to Stay Quiet
This plea is for the legions of doctors, nurses, college administrators, teachers, students, public-sector employees, corporate managers, pharmaceutical employees, laboratory scientists, media professionals, journalists in mainstream news, and tech workers who know where all the “bodies are buried,” in the metaphorical phrase.
They have lived with this knowledge for more than three years. They know the players, the plans, the bureaucratic wrangling, the methods, the lies, the brutality, and the victims. They are holding onto memos, texts, conversations, and unforgettable images in their heads. They are aching to speak. They know what they saw was wrong. But they are also terrified to speak out.
Here’s the problem. It’s easy to make a principled case for doing the right thing. It’s much more difficult to make a practical case.
That’s because there are sometimes huge costs that come with standing up, speaking out, turning over documents, telling stories, and revealing truths. They are deeply uncomfortable, even career-threatening. You might not win and you might be hounded to the ends of the earth. All your secrets could come out too. Indeed, there are powerful people who want it to be so, as a lesson to others.
EU Tech Chief Sees Draft Voluntary AI Code Within Weeks
EU tech chief Margrethe Vestager said on Wednesday she believed a draft code of conduct on artificial intelligence (AI) could be drawn up within weeks, allowing industry to commit to a final proposal “very, very soon.”
Policymakers and many in the industry have expressed concern about AI, particularly content-creating generative AI such as ChatGPT, with some equating it to the risks posed by pandemics or nuclear war. Vestager said the United States and European Union should push a voluntary code to provide safeguards while new laws are developed.
The European Union’s AI Act, with rules on facial recognition and biometric surveillance, is still going through the legislative process.
‘Robustly Transparent’ or ‘Really Slippery’? U.K. Ministers Dispute WhatsApp Disclosures in COVID Inquiry
Get ready for another three years of this. With the coronavirus pandemic over, the U.K.’s official inquiry into it — expected to run until 2026 — has yet to hold a single public hearing. But it’s already embroiled in a bitter disclosure dispute with the government over whether to hand over ministers’ private WhatsApp messages and notebooks.
The post-mortem will drag on past the next general election, as confirmed Tuesday. It’s expected to call on senior figures from a series of British governments, roving over the state’s preparedness for the virus, decision-making by ministers and officials, the way public contracts were handed out, and how the country got jabs in arms.
Yet before any of that, there’s the small matter of what the inquiry will actually be allowed to see.
Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting told Sky News Wednesday: “I think the prime minister looks really slippery today. He says he wants the government to cooperate with the inquiry but the government has been withholding information the inquiry has asked for.” He added: “One minute the government says the messages they have are immaterial; the next minute they’re saying they don’t exist. Which is it?”
