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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Europe Is Regulating AI Hiring; Why Isn’t The United States?

In 2018, Amazon unveiled a groundbreaking AI hiring tool. But what began as a promise to revolutionize how the company identified talent devolved into an algorithm that “did not like women.” The model, trained on a decade of old resumes mostly from men, penalized references to women’s organizations and graduates of women’s colleges. Although Amazon abandoned the tool, the incident revealed a more fundamental problem: In automating hiring, employers are also automating bias. Today, AI plays a major role in hiring, yet the U.S. has failed to establish coherent guardrails even as jurisdictions like the European Union have acted decisively.

AI-Powered Drones Used In Gaza Now Surveil US Cities

AI-powered quadcopter drones used by Israel in its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza are now being used to surveil US citizens, from protestors to spring breakers, in all major US cities, according to a report from the journalist project ¡Do Not Panic! published on 3 November. Hundreds of drones manufactured by the US company Skydio were delivered to Israel after the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023 for use in the strip. Now, they are flying daily above all major US cities, including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cleveland, and Jacksonville, while automatically uploading millions of images to an evidence database.

Interview With Katya Schwenk On AI Surveillance Pricing

ou go to buy a ticket for a flight; you think the price is the price, but, in fact, the airline is using lots of available information about you to present the highest price they think you will pay. Yes, airlines have always tweaked prices based on status or frequency of flying, but this is different. This is companies using information you didn’t share with them, determining what they, openly among themselves, call your “pain point,” the maximum you will spend before you say, “OK, I just won’t see my mother this year.” Some insist this is just the market at work, but what can we do if we decide it’s actually an instance of using technology to do something because it can, without adequate consideration of whether it should?

Hi-Tech Holocaust: How Microsoft Aids The Gaza Genocide

Israel’s genocide is being powered by Microsoft. From creating a massive digital dragnet, aiding in the production of A.I.-generated kill lists, hiring hundreds of Israeli spies to run its internal affairs, and suppressing figures opposing the slaughter, the Seattle-based tech corporation has played a key role in the violence. MintPress has detailed the deep collaboration between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Amazon, Google, TikTok, Apple, Palantir, and Oracle, but Microsoft’s relationship with the government and armed forces of Israel is potentially the closest, leading then-CEO Steve Ballmer to state that “Microsoft is as much an Israeli company as an American company.”

The Data Brokers Fueling ICE’s Deportation Machine

In the current political climate, the last bulwark against the abusive deployment of corporate-owned generative artificial intelligence might just come from union shareholders. AI tools are constantly evolving, and ​“with no one stepping in to create some guardrails, they will become harder and harder to regulate,” says Emma Pullman, head of shareholder engagement at the British Columbia General Employees’ Union (BCGEU) in Canada. The union, representing more than 95,000 members in the public and private sectors, is a long-term investor in Thomson Reuters and is pressuring the Toronto-based data broker to align its AI products with human rights principles. “As investors, we are thinking about this as a risk to our investments, but also as a social and ethical issue,” Pullman says.

Data Centers And The AI Bubble

For the last month or so, investors, business gurus, and veritable Wolves of Wall Street have been discussing the massive–and growing–AI financial bubble. Speculative bubbles are nothing new in the American economy. The other imperialist countries in Europe are slightly insulated from this financialization, although not entirely. AI has been on the tip of everyone’s tongues for some time now, and many services–email, customer service, shopping sites, and even social media are full of AI chatbots or ‘virtual assistants’ which promise to ease your time on the web.

OpenAI Slipped Shopping Into 800 Million ChatGPT Users’ Chats

Your phone buzzes at 6 a.m. It’s ChatGPT: “I see you’re traveling to New York this week. Based on your preferences, I’ve found three restaurants near your hotel. Would you like me to make a reservation?” You didn’t ask for this. The AI simply knew your plans from scanning your calendar and email and decided to help. Later, you mention to the chatbot needing flowers for your wife’s birthday. Within seconds, beautiful arrangements appear in the chat. You tap one: “Buy now.” Done. The flowers are ordered. This isn’t science fiction.

The AI Race: How The Surge In Data Centers Harms Us

There are more than 5,400 data centers in the United States, which is almost half of the number of data centers worldwide. In the past four years, there has been a surge in data center construction, particularly in poor communities in the South. Clearing the FOG speaks with Jai Dulani of Media Justice, who authored a new report: The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South, and Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson, about the harms that these centers are causing in local communities, particularly in their enormous consumption of water and energy, and the risk they pose to the US economy. Akuno also addresses the bigger picture of the deleterious impact of artificial intelligence on our lives.

Avoiding The AI Hypetrain

I have to admit, I do find it a bit amusing to watch someone climb onboard a hypetrain at the exact moment that said train is hurtling off a cliff. It does spoil the fun though, when that someone is an apex organization for the national coopererative movement. Unfortunately, that's what it felt like last week when I happened upon a video of NCBA CLUSA's most recent Co-op Circle Happy Hour. The topic for the event was "Cooperatives on AI, Data, and Democracy"; and the first 10 minutes consisted of a presentation by NCBA's Senior Director of Information Technology about ways that co-ops can use "AI." I put "AI" in scare-quotes because that term covers a broad range of tools that have very little, if anything, in common with each other.

Artificial Intelligence Furthers Environmental Racism In Black America

When one of my best friends (who is also a pastor) encouraged me to look into utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for ministry purposes, I was exhilarated. It seemed like a game-changer at my fingertips. I used it to make presentations and outline Bible studies, saving time on the tasks that often fill my days. The opportunities seemed endless, and the convenience was remarkable. Regular projects and tasks that I had poured effort into before could now be completed in mere seconds. Not only did I start utilizing it, but I started singing its praises as well to all who would listen.

Where Is The Artificial Intelligence Safety Movement?

Whether or not we realize it, artificial intelligence is reshaping the world with breathtaking speed. Promoted as a panacea to cure diseases, revolutionize industries and tackle the world’s most intractable problems, AI is also quietly displacing workers, amplifying biases and creating surveillance systems pervasive and pernicious enough for any dystopian. As if that weren’t enough, there’s the prospect of super intelligent AI outpacing human control altogether. So where are the humans in all this? Where are the protests, the people out on the streets, the demands for safeguards, for oversight, for input from normal people?

AI Energy Demand Can Keep Fossil Fuels Alive

Just before the November 2024 election, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released its flagship annual report on global energy markets – and the agency’s forecast suggested a new era was dawning. Over 150 years of growth in demand for fossil fuels has nearly reached its end, the IEA’s forecasts showed for a second year in a row. Fossil fuel demand will peak by the end of this decade, the organization affirmed, concluding that clean energy like wind, solar, and storage look increasingly capable of driving fossil fuels out of global energy markets – and soon.

Junk Science And Bad Policing: The Homicide Prediction Project

The law enforcement breed can be a pretty dark lot. To be paid to think suspiciously leaves its mark, fostering an incentive to identify crimes and misdemeanours with instinctive compulsion. Historically, this saw the emergence of quackery and bogus attempts to identify criminal tendencies. Craniometry and skull size was, for a time, an attractive pursuit for the aspiring crime hunter and lunatic sleuth. The crime fit the skull. With the onset of facial recognition technologies, we are seeing the same old habits appear, with their human creators struggling to identify the best means of eliminating compromising biases.

Elon Musk’s DOGE Reportedly Installed Artificial Intelligence At The EPA

Two people familiar with the use of technology by Elon Musk’s DOGE team told Reuters that the team has setup artificial intelligence to spy on employees at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The objective, according to the two media sources, is to look for “language in communications considered hostile” to Musk or President Donald Trump. “Trump-appointed officials who had taken up EPA posts told managers that DOGE was using AI to monitor communication apps and software, including Microsoft Teams, which is widely used for virtual calls and chats,” the sources additionally claimed.

State Department To Use AI To Revoke Visas Of Students Who ‘Appear Pro-Hamas’

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is launching an AI-driven effort to revoke the visas of foreigners in the US who “appear pro-Hamas” in a crackdown targeting pro-Palestine protests on college campuses, Axios reported on Thursday. The report said the effort will involve AI-assisted reviews of social media accounts of tens of thousands of foreign students in the US on visas that will look for “evidence of alleged terrorist sympathies expressed after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.” The language in the report suggests that any foreign students who attend pro-Palestine demonstrations or express sympathy for Palestinians online could be swept up in the crackdown since opponents of the Israeli siege on Gaza or US military support for Israel are often labeled “pro-Hamas.”
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