Tag: technology

AI tool used to spot child abuse allegedly targets parents with disabilities

Since 2016, social workers in a Pennsylvania county have relied on an algorithm to help them determine which child welfare calls warrant further investigation. Now, the Justice Department is reportedly scrutinizing the controversial family-screening tool over concerns that using the algorithm may be violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by allegedly discriminating against families with disabilities, the Associated Press reported, including families with mental health issues.

Three anonymous sources broke their confidentiality agreements with the Justice Department, confirming to AP that civil rights attorneys have been fielding complaints since last fall and have grown increasingly concerned about alleged biases built into the Allegheny County Family Screening Tool. While the full scope of the Justice Department’s alleged scrutiny is currently unknown, the Civil Rights Division is seemingly interested in learning more about how using the data-driven tool could potentially be hardening historical systemic biases against people with disabilities.

The county describes its predictive risk modeling tool as a preferred resource to reduce human error for social workers benefiting from the algorithm’s rapid analysis of “hundreds of data elements for each person involved in an allegation of child maltreatment.” That includes “data points tied to disabilities in children, parents, and other members of local households,” Allegheny County told AP. Those data points contribute to an overall risk score that helps determine if a child should be removed from their home.

Although the county told AP that social workers can override the tool’s recommendations and that the algorithm has been updated “several times” to remove disabilities-related data points, critics worry that the screening tool may still be automating discrimination. This is particularly concerning because the Pennsylvania algorithm has inspired similar tools used in California and Colorado, AP reported. Oregon stopped using its family-screening tool over similar concerns that its algorithm may be exacerbating racial biases in its child welfare data.

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NASA, DARPA Testing Nuclear Engine For Future Mars Missions

NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a plan on Tuesday to test out a nuclear-powered thermal rocket engine which will enable NASA-crewed missions to Mars, according to NASA.

The program, called Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations, or DRACO, could allow for faster transit time, an increased payload capacity, and higher power for instrumentation and communication.

In a nuclear thermal rocket engine, a fission reactor is used to generate extremely high temperatures. The engine transfers the heat produced by the reactor to a liquid propellant, which is expanded and exhausted through a nozzle to propel the spacecraft. Nuclear thermal rockets can be three or more times more efficient than conventional chemical propulsion. -NASA

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Mexico Becomes First Nation to Admit Harms of Geoengineering, Halts Future Experiments

The Mexican government has announced a moratorium on solar geoengineering experiments following an unauthorized small-scale experiment by a U.S. startup. How will the decision impact the plans of globalists who aim to use geoengineering as a gateway to world governance?

Only weeks ago, Luke Iseman, the CEO of Make Sunsets, the company behind the experiment, announced to the world that he had released two weather balloons filled with reflective sulfur particles as part of publicity stunt meant to spark conversation around the science of geoengineering.

Geoengineering is a controversial science of manipulating the climate for the stated purpose of fighting man-made climate change. There are several types of geoengineering, including Solar Radiation Management (SRM) or solar geoengineering.  Stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI, is a specific solar geoengineering practice which involves spraying aerosols into the sky in an attempt to deflect the sun’s rays. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is currently developing a five-year research plan on solar geoengineering.

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WEF hears about technology that allows your thoughts to be monitored

The annual World Economic Forum (WEF) gathering has always been a testing ground for some bizarre ideas, which nonetheless serve a purpose: to introduce, and if possible normalize all kinds of mass surveillance and sometimes extremely privacy-invasive technologies.

And monitoring people’s brain activity, including via implants – surely, it doesn’t get much more invasive than that.

Yet this was one of the technologies presented at an event in Davos this year by Duke University Professor Nita Farahany.

Brain implants are not new in and of themselves, as are used in medicine to treat some serious conditions. However, the kind brought up here at one point are the ones to be put into healthy people – basically to read their minds.

“Decoding complex thought,” is already possible, Farahany said during her “Ready for Brain Transparency?” talk at the WEF summit last week. And the tech now is also able to reveal the degree of stress somebody is experiencing, as well as what they are paying attention to. So, the goal is to know what/how a person is feeling, what they are thinking, and what draws their interest.

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A chatbot that lets you talk with Jesus and Hitler is the latest controversy in the AI gold rush

It’s a classic parlor game: Which three people from history would you invite to dinner? 

Now, a new app brings the experience to your phone with help from an artificial intelligence chatbot, allowing users to have text conversations with robots meant to simulate the perspectives of notable people from history, from Babe Ruth to Adolf Hitler. 

The app, called Historical Figures, has begun to take off in the two weeks since it was released as a way to have conversations with any of 20,000 notable people from history.

But this week, it sparked viral controversy online over its inclusion of Hitler, his Nazi lieutenants and other dictators from the past. 

“Are neo-Nazis going to be attracted to this site so they can go and have a dialogue with Adolf Hitler?” asked Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the director of global social action for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization. 

The app, created by a 25-year-old Amazon software engineer, is part of the latest rush in tech to build on top of AI software such as ChatGPT, an advanced chatbot prototype that burst onto the scene less than two months ago. 

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Scientists Have Successfully Reversed Signs of Aging in Mice for the First Time

Two research groups in the US were able to stop mice from getting old by fixing their DNA.

In a recent study published in Cell on Jan. 12, Harvard scientists showed that they could manipulate and reverse the aging process in mice by generating DNA repairs.

The results of a 13-year, international study show for the first time that breakdown in epigenetic information accelerates aging in mice and that repairing the epigenome can reverse those signs of aging.

“For about the past 50 years, popular theory has held that the process of aging is caused in large part by an accumulation of mutation. There’s growing evidence, however, that aging has a significant epigenetic component. That is, the process by which stretches of DNA or the genes are turned on and off,” said the paper’s senior author, David Sinclair, professor of genetics at the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research.

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Former Intelligence Director says UFO report raises concern U.S. behind on military technology

Former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe is suggesting a new Pentagon report on UFOs should raise concerns about more than alien life, saying it might highlight possible weaknesses in America’s current military technologies.

“I know everyone gets caught up on the alien life and all of that, but my concern as the director of national intelligence was, if anyone, foreign adversary, regardless of how you define foreign adversary, have technologies that the United States don’t have, we need to find out more about that,” Ratcliffe stressed during an interview with Fox & Friends on Sunday. 

Ratcliffe said he disclosed the existence of an unidentified aerial phenomenon task force to the Senate Intelligence Committee because “I wanted there to be greater transparency to the American people about the number of sightings of things that are unexplained.” 

He explained that during his time as DNI the government he learned that “Navy pilots and Air Force pilots were discouraged from reporting” UFO sightings because they thought that it would ruin their careers.

“We need to have information if there are technologies out there, and very clearly, as this most recent report reveals, the sightings are increasing, which is a good thing, because that means we’re getting more honest reporting from our Navy and Air Force pilots,” Ratcliffe said. “But it gives us more information… there very clearly are now hundreds of unexplained sightings, meaning that there’s no natural phenomenon involved.”

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What Privacy? This AI Can Identify You by Your Computer Habits

The world of privacy is a constant battlefield. It’s not a static decision where once you’ve done this one single step, you’re now good until the end of time. Instead, you have to stay abreast of the research, studying the ways that privacy is constantly being diminished so that you can then take the appropriate steps to respond.

If you’ve read through a privacy policy for an app, website, or contract in the past, you’ve likely noticed that they state they may sell your data to third parties. Exactly who these third parties are, you never know, nor what your information is being used for in the first place.

But sometimes you find the privacy policy tries to add a feel-good clause here, saying something to the extent that “our data about you is completely anonymous.”

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ARPA-H: The Nosy Love Child of DARPA and the NIH

On March 15, 2022, President Biden signed a law allowing for the creation and funding of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The agency received $1 billion for fiscal year 2022.

ARPA-H’s stated mission is  to“accelerate better health outcomes for everyone by supporting the development of high-impact solutions to society’s most challenging health problems.”  So, the federal government is tossing another billion into the black hole that is the American health care system.  Okay.

We’re already spending a fortune on healthcare.

Let’s think about this for a minute.  The U.S. already spends far more per capita than any other nation in the world.  We spend an average of $11,495 per person, per year.  Most other First World countries hover between $5000 and $6000.  (source)

Health care in the U.S. represented 17.7% of the economy as of 2018, and has been projected to increase to 19.7% in 2028.  That means that more than 1 in 6 dollars spent in the U.S. is being spent on healthcare.

So, is this paying off?  Are Americans the healthiest people in the world?

No.  We’re sick and have been getting sicker.  Our life expectancy dropped again last year, to 76.4 years, which is the lowest since the 1990s.  Meanwhile people in dozens of other countries can expect to live into their 80s on average, American life expectancy just continues to drop. I don’t think we’re getting what we pay for.

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Artificial Intelligence-Powered ‘Robot Lawyer’ to Represent Human in Court Next Month

A robot powered by artificial intelligence is set to become the world’s first “robot lawyer” and will take on speeding ticket cases in court next month, its creators have said.

Joshua Browder, the CEO of Startup DoNotPay, which bills itself as “the home of the world’s first robot lawyer” confirmed the news on Twitter on Monday.

Browder said the company is offering to pay any lawyer or person $1 million to use the AI lawyer in an upcoming case in front of the United States Supreme Court.

“We have upcoming cases in municipal (traffic) court next month. But the haters will say ‘traffic court is too simple for GPT.’ So we are making this serious offer, contingent on us coming to a formal agreement and all rules being followed,” Browder wrote.

The CEO did not provide further details regarding the defendants in the case or the location of the court.

According to DoNotPay’s official website, the company uses artificial intelligence to “help consumers fight against large corporations and solve their problems like beating parking tickets, appealing bank fees, and suing robocallers.”

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