Surveillance
A group of leaders from some of the country’s top schools have issued a warning
The Government is responding too slowly to the dangers of artificial intelligence, which poses the greatest threat to education, according to head teachers.
A group of leaders from some of the country’s top schools have issued a letter warning of the “very real and present hazards and dangers” being presented by the technology.
They have called on schools to collaborate in order to ensure AI works in their best interests and those of pupils, amid fears it is being used as a shortcut by pupils across the country for completing work.
The group, led by Sir Anthony Seldon, the head of Epsom College, also told the times they are launching a body to advise and protect schools from the risks AI poses.
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Read MoreSupreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch on Thursday lamented what he calls an intrusion into civil liberties by pandemic emergency decrees since the start of COVID-19 as the high court dismissed a suit on Title 42 as moot.
“Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country,” Gorsuch, one of six conservative-leaning Supreme Court justices, said in an opinion accompanying the court’s decision (pdf) published on Thursday.
Gorsuch wrote that emergency decrees ordering vaccine mandates and lockdowns issued by federal and state executive agencies resulted in an accumulation of power in those agencies and accompanied this loss of liberties during the pandemic.
“The concentration of power in the hands of so few may be efficient and sometimes popular. But it does not tend toward sound government,” the justice wrote. “However wise one person or his advisors may be, that is no substitute for the wisdom of the whole of the American people that can be tapped in the legislative process.”
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Read MoreWith news of the Chinese Communist Party’s rampant targeting of the Chinese diaspora and dissidents of the regime in Canada coming to the fore in recent months, a new report from a House of Commons committee urges the government to push back against such threats and to find ways to protect Canadians from arbitrary detention by malign regimes.
The report, published by the Special Committee on the Canada–People’s Republic of China Relationship (CACN), compiles testimonies from 50 witnesses who have appeared at the committee over two parliamentary sessions. Many witnesses have offered stories and personal experiences of intimidation and harassment by the Chinese regime.
The report noted that CACN’s national security study on the issue first began during China’s arbitrary detention of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who were held in Chinese prison for over 1,000 days before being released in September 2021. However, the report also draws attention to other cases where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has arbitrarily detained Canadians, or people with links to Canada.
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Read MoreThe explosion of generative AI has taken the world by storm, but one question all too rarely comes up: Who can afford it?
OpenAI bled around $540 million last year as it developed ChatGPT and says it needs $100 billion to meet its ambitions, according to industry media The Information.
“We’re going to be the most capital-intensive startup in Silicon Valley history,” OpenAI’s founder Sam Altman told a panel recently.
And when Microsoft, which poured billions of dollars in investment into OpenAI, is asked about how much its AI adventure will cost, the company answers with assurances that it is keeping an eye on its bottom line.
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Read MoreU.S. lawmakers are considering a bill that would grant the U.S. government vast new powers to surveil and censor U.S. citizens.
The RESTRICT Act — the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act, or Senate Bill 686 — would give the federal government new powers ostensibly to mitigate national security threats posed by technology products from countries that the U.S. deems adversarial.
The bill would grant the U.S. secretary of commerce the authority to “identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate” national security risks associated with technology linked to a foreign adversary.
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Read MoreOpenAI CEO Sam Altman will attend the secretive Bilderberg Meeting, an annual gathering of over 100 political and corporate leaders from Europe and North America, which has announced AI as a key item on its agenda this year.
Altman isn’t the only Big Tech figure in attendance. Other participants include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis.
Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), will also attend. As noted in a congressional hearing last week, CISA played a key role as a source of government pressure in the Big Tech censorship regime that harmed President Trump’s chances in the 2020 election.
The meeting will take place from 18 to 21 May in Lisbon, Portugal. The list of items up for discussion, published by Bilderberg here, is as follows:
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Read MoreMontana has become the first U.S. state to ban the China-owned app TikTok. Governor Greg Gianforte (R) announced Wednesday that he has singed legislation in order to protect his state’s residents from “the Chinese Communist Party.”
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Read MoreMost of the job cuts made by the telecommunications company will take place in the United Kingdom
British Telecommunications (BT) will cut 55,000 jobs by the end of the decade in an attempt to cut costs.
Customer services roles will account for up to a fifth of all redundancies.
Departing customer services staff will be replaced by technologies, including artificial intelligence.
However, the overall cut backs will include both staff and contractors.
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Read MoreThe objective is to help protect the Catholic faithful from fake priests and religious predators…vocal groups of abuse victims in France have slammed the measure as “one of the Catholic Church’s top three most stupid ideas,” claiming that it did not address the causes of abuse.
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Read MoreThe U.S. military’s chief information officer (CIO) and former CIA deputy director John Sherman said his office will assume control of all 5G-related activities in the U.S. military and expand the military’s 5G pilot programs — a move critics said could lead to increased surveillance of U.S. citizens.
The move will shift the Pentagon’s 5G efforts from the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Heidi Shyu, to Sherman’s office.
The transition will officially take effect on Oct. 1, but Sherman said his office has “already been working left seat, right seat with research and engineering on this, [in] a very close partnership with Honorable Heidi Shyu and her team.”
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