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Novak Djokovic to Miss Miami Open, Denied COVID Vaccine Exemption
Tennis star Novak Djokovic will miss the Miami Open after failing to get an exemption under coronavirus vaccine rules to enter the United States. The world No. 1, who is not vaccinated against the coronavirus, had hoped U.S. authorities would grant him an exemption so he could play at Indian Wells and the Miami Open. The Transportation Security Administration requires proof of vaccination from air travelers under a rule in place through at least April 10.
But Miami Open tournament director James Blake said that while they had tried to secure entry for the 35-year-old Serbian star, “that wasn’t able to happen.”
Politicians including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) have recently urged President Biden to exempt the top-ranked player so he could compete in the Miami Open, set to take place March 19 to April 2 in Miami Gardens, Fla. Florida’s two Republican senators had also asked Biden to accept the request for a vaccine waiver.
The athlete’s unvaccinated status amid coronavirus restrictions left him unable to play in last year’s U.S. Open. He was deported from Australia in January last year in a saga that divided his fans and detractors as health officials globally encouraged vaccination to fight the spread of the deadly virus. A mandatory vaccine requirement did not apply for entry to Britain, and Djokovic went on to successfully defend his men’s singles title at Wimbledon last July.
Schools Sue Social Media Companies Over Youth Mental Health Crisis
School districts across the country are increasingly taking on social media, filing lawsuits that argue that Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube have helped create the nation’s surging youth mental health crisis and should be held accountable.
The legal action started in January, with a suit by Seattle Public Schools, and picked up momentum in recent weeks as school districts in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida have followed. Lawyers involved say many more are planned.
San Mateo County, home to 23 school districts and part of the Silicon Valley in northern California, filed a 107-page complaint in federal court last week, alleging that social media companies used advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to create addictive platforms that cause young people harm.
“The results have been disastrous,” the filing asserts, saying more children than ever struggle with their mental health amid excessive use of the platforms. “There is simply no historic analog to the crisis the nation’s youth are now facing,” it said.
Private-Federal Censorship Machine Targeted TRUE ‘Misinformation’
Did you make any “worrisome jokes” about the Biden administration’s proposal to send agents door-to-door to browbeat people to get COVID vaccines? Then you were a public enemy guilty of spreading dangerous disinformation.
Did you ask questions about COVID policy? You were guilty of a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation to deflect culpability.” Did you complain to anyone that vaccine passports violated your liberty? You were deluded, if not depraved, and guilty of propelling a deceptive “anti-vaccination narrative about the loss of rights and freedoms.”
Your tax dollars at work: These are the bizarre revelations from the latest and perhaps funniest Twitter Files from Matt Taibbi. Now, Taibbi has settled scores with “The Great COVID-19 Lie Machine,” exposing the machinations of federal contractors spurring social-media companies to censor Americans who doubted COVID decrees.
The latest Twitter Files installment focuses on Stanford University’s Virality Project, which federal agencies bankrolled to engage in “detecting and mitigating the impact of false and misleading narratives related to COVID-19 vaccines.” The Virality Project, partnering with other federal contractors, sent weekly “anti-vax disinformation” reports to Twitter and other social media companies.
Washington Prepares for War With Amazon
The Biden administration is planning to take action soon on at least three of its half-dozen investigations of Amazon — moves that could lead to a blitz of litigation to rein in the iconic tech-industry giant.
The FTC has been investigating the internet titan on multiple fronts dating at least back to 2019, looking into its abuse of power within its online marketplace, as well as potential consumer-privacy violations connected to its Ring cameras and Alexa digital assistant.
The agency is also reviewing Amazon’s purchase of robot vacuum maker iRobot.
Although Amazon has already been hit by local antitrust suits in Washington, DC, and California, the coming federal cases would be the most significant challenges to the global company yet. The exact timing of any cases or settlements is unknown.
The Case for Slowing Down AI
Progress in artificial intelligence has been moving so unbelievably fast lately that the question is becoming unavoidable: How long until AI dominates our world to the point where we’re answering to it rather than it answering to us?
First, last year, we got DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, which can turn a few words of text into a stunning image. Then Microsoft-backed OpenAI gave us ChatGPT, which can write essays so convincing that it freaks out everyone from teachers (what if it helps students cheat?) to journalists (could it replace them?) to disinformation experts (will it amplify conspiracy theories?). And in February, we got Bing (a.k.a. Sydney), the chatbot that both delighted and disturbed beta users with eerie interactions. Now we’ve got GPT-4 — not just the latest large language model, but a multimodal one that can respond to text as well as images.
What if researchers succeed in creating AI that matches or surpasses human capabilities not just in one domain, like playing strategy games, but in many domains? What if that system proved dangerous to us, not because it actively wants to wipe out humanity but just because it’s pursuing goals in ways that aren’t aligned with our values?
So AI threatens to join existing catastrophic risks to humanity, things like global nuclear war or bioengineered pandemics. But there’s a difference. While there’s no way to uninvent the nuclear bomb or the genetic engineering tools that can juice pathogens, catastrophic AI has yet to be created, meaning it’s one type of doom we have the ability to preemptively stop.
U.S. Companies Must Stop Enabling Mass DNA Collection in Tibet
The Chinese government is so innovative in applying advanced technology for repression, sometimes it is hard to keep track. Beijing’s latest, horrible abuse of the Tibetan people is to forcibly collect their DNA, their last remaining vestige of privacy. What’s worse, U.S. companies are still working with the authorities perpetrating these atrocities. They should cut that out right now.
There is overwhelming evidence that Chinese authorities are using mass forced DNA collection in many parts of China — but Tibet is an especially cruel case. Human rights groups report that police are taking blood samples from men, women and children, with no legitimate justification, in all seven prefectures in the Tibetan autonomous region, often showing up at kindergartens. There’s zero indication Tibetans can refuse.
Chinese police in Tibet aren’t exactly hiding the practice; they posted a public request for bids to build a huge DNA database online. In one municipality, an official report said police were instructed “not to miss a [single] village or monastery, and not to miss a [single] household or person,” according to Human Rights Watch. The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab estimated in September that one-quarter to one-third of Tibetans had been compelled to hand over DNA samples.
Chinese authorities’ sweeping collection of DNA is just one piece of one of the most comprehensive and intrusive surveillance and monitoring systems on Earth. The Chinese government is leveraging technology, including artificial intelligence and big data, to identify people by their faces, their voices, their individual styles of walking and, now, even their cellular makeup.
100,000 Newborn Babies Will Have Their Genomes Sequenced in the U.K. It Could Have Big Implications for Child Medicine
The U.K. is set to begin sequencing the genomes of 100,000 newborn babies later this year. It will be the largest study of its kind, mapping the babies’ complete set of genetic instructions, with potentially profound implications for child medicine.
The £105 million ($126 million) Newborn Genomes Programme will screen for around 200 rare but treatable genetic conditions, with the aim of curtailing untold pain and anxiety for babies and their families, who sometimes struggle to receive a diagnosis through conventional testing. By accelerating the diagnostic process, earlier treatment of infants could prevent many severe conditions from ever developing.
The study would see roughly one in 12 newborn babies in England screened on a voluntary basis over two years. It will operate as an extension of current newborn testing, with the findings intended to inform policymakers, who could pave the way for sequencing to become more commonplace.
Nevertheless, the project has raised many longstanding ethical questions around genetics, consent, data privacy and priorities within infant healthcare. Genome sequencing has raised many philosophical and ethical questions. If you could have aspects of your medical future laid ahead of you, would you want that? What if you were predisposed to an incurable disease? Could that knowledge alone impact your quality of life?
The BBC, Which Has 4 Million Followers on TikTok, Tells Employees Not to Download TikTok
The BBC has 4.4 million followers on TikTok, and it posts new videos every couple of hours on its main account. If you work at the venerable British broadcaster, however, the organization says you shouldn’t watch those TikToks. The BBC sent its employees a memo on Sunday, urging them not to download the world’s scariest Chinese app.
“We don’t recommend installing TikTok on a BBC corporate device unless there is a justified business reason,” the BBC wrote to staffers, according to Bloomberg. “If you do not need TikTok for business reasons, TikTok should be deleted.”
TikTok and the BBC are competitors. The BBC is an entertainment company and is therefore fighting for the same eyeballs as TikTok. Whether or not espionage fears are real, the admonition on downloading the app may be motivated by business concerns.
