Technology

The future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not fully determined, but it will continue to have a significant impact on our society and the way we live. The ways it currently impacts society are through improvements in efficiency, productivity, and accessibility. Self-driving cars relying on AI, AI-powered robots are used to provide aid and assistance in the healthcare system, and AI security systems are used to automate threat detection, among other examples. Although AI creates positive advantages and impacts, it also creates negative effects. The negative effects cover the environment, employment and other fields. These examples are often caused by  products that use and incorporate AI, but what (potential) harm is created due to inaccuracies within the actual systems of AI?

California styles itself as a leader in AI regulation.  Two landmark bills were signed by Governor Newsom this year over the usual industry objections.  But the bills don’t go as far as safety advocates wanted, and don’t offer sufficient protections to young, vulnerable users.

Complaints about META’s failure to protect children from the ills of social media continue to plague the company.  Most recently, unauthorized images of children were used in ads for Meta’s Threads app, and a significant study of the company’s improvements in response to previous concerns criticized its efforts as largely ineffective.

Google’s critics and competitors celebrated a court decision last year that found Google in violation of antitrust laws due to its monopolies over search services and online advertising.  Smaller companies, increasingly dependent on search rankings and online ads, simply can’t compete 

Artificial Intelligence is more ubiquitous in our daily lives than you may realize.  It drives the constant stream of personalized ads, instant navigation directions when driving, voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa, shows up first in our Google searches, and much more. The massive data centers powering all that instant intelligence are less visible  to those of us who use it the most.  But they have become ubiquitous in lower-income communities of color, communities with the least access to high-speed home internet and some of the worst air pollution in the country.

Few people are likely to miss the click-to-cancel rule.  Consumers won’t, since they never had a chance to enjoy it, and businesses won’t because they hated it.  The rule, which would have required all sorts of online businesses to make it easy for consumers to cancel unwanted subscriptions and memberships, was blocked by a federal appeals court just days before it was set to go into effect, a ruling that is unlikely to be appealed.  Trump opposes consumer protections and is reshaping the FTC to carry forward his pro-business agenda.

The clash between TikTok and the U.S. government centers on national security and data privacy concerns tied to its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. TikTok, with around 170 million American users, faces a federal mandate under the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), signed April 24, 2024, requiring it to divest its U.S. operations or face a nationwide ban effective January 19, 2025. The Supreme Court upheld PAFACA in TikTok v. Garland on January 17, 2025, finding it constitutional and not in violation of First Amendment rights.

Palantir Technologies’ data tracking software and Artificial Intelligence tools are playing a huge role in the ICE sweeps plaguing communities throughout the US, sparking a national day of protests and concerns over a revolving door between the company and key government agencies.

The Trump organization has dropped any pretense of avoiding conflicts of interest.  Instead, it is blatantly cashing in on Trump’s presidency in every conceivable way.  At the top of the list is tech, with both Trump and his wife selling digital currencies and a new Trump mobile phone on the way.  An additional bonus is that Trump has a great deal of power over the agencies that oversee these industries, and Congress is doing nothing to stop him from taking advantage of it.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the discipline of designing computer systems that can perform tasks normally requiring human cognition—pattern recognition, language generation, planning—by learning statistical relationships from large data sets. Modern AI works by training vast machine-learning models on petabytes of text, images, audio, and code and then applying those models to new inputs to produce predictions or content; it now powers everything from chatbots and fraud detection to medical imaging and autonomous drones.

In his first few days in office, Donald Trump announced a $500 billion joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank to invest in growing the US’s AI infrastructure and rescinded former President Joe Biden’s executive order requiring safety submissions from AI developers.  His big, beautiful bill showers much more money in the industry, and aims to eliminate state oversight or regulation of AI companies as well.

The Israeli military uses Artificial Intelligence to find and target Hamas fighters, but with a civilian death toll estimated at 52,000, critics allege the system is not reliable and may even be providing cover for widespread bombing and ethnic cleansing.  And that US companies are complicit.