Eric Smalley

Always watching: How ICE’s plan to monitor social media 24/7 threatens privacy and civic participation ICE’s dragnet is expanding across social media, putting everyone’s digital lives into the realm of border and immigration enforcement.

ICE's dragnet is expanding across social media, putting everyone's digital lives into the realm of border and immigration enforcement.

We like to stop the process before they're all the way dry and then freeze them. You get the space saving of drying, they remain mostly separated when you freeze them, and they retain much of their fleshy texture when you cook with them (no need to rehydrate for those who do that).

OpenAI slipped shopping into 800 million ChatGPT users’ chats − here’s why that matters AI agents are poised to do your online shopping for you, with major consequences for the e-commerce industry – and your ability to make choices.

Are you going to let a chatbot do your shopping for you?

I'd like to see ideas for how to use that space post-Trump. Maybe a contest for architecture students?

Concerns about AI-written police reports spur states to regulate the emerging practice AI-generated police reports promise to save cops time, but they also raise a host of legal and technical concerns.

AI Police reports must be disclosed in California. My take. theconversation.com/concerns-abo...

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So if you’re asking if there is a strongly anti-AI stance that doesn’t directly account for AI‘s social and economic contexts (and so not readily framed as political), I think you could go with consumer protection. You could argue that AI products and services are fraudulent, defective or dangerous.

VCs call it going sideways and they consider it a sin.

Caught the Blue Ribbons at the Lizard last week and hoo boy! Jef Charland tore it up on upright.

Golden Dome dangers: An arms control expert explains how Trump’s missile defense threatens to make the US less safe Missile defense systems are nothing new. History shows that even if they work as advertised – a big if – they’re a bad idea if your aim is to make your country safer from nuclear attack.

Missile defenses make us safer, right? Right? Well, actually... Harvard arms control expert Matthew Bunn explains the long history of nuclear "shields" and the destabilizing effect of building them.

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Challenges to high-performance computing threaten US innovation Today’s supercomputers are enormously powerful, but the work they do − running AI and tackling difficult science − is pushing them to their limits. Building bigger supercomputers won’t be easy.

A look at the state of US high-performance computing by one of the senior figures in the field.

From help to harm: How the government is quietly repurposing everyone’s data for surveillance Under the guise of efficiency and fraud prevention, the federal government is breaking down data silos to collect and aggregate information on virtually everyone in the US.

Here's a good look at what all that DOGE activity and talk of breaking down data silos in the government means.

AI as Normal Technology

In a new essay from our "Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms" series, @randomwalker.bsky.social & @sayash.bsky.social make the case for thinking of #AI as normal technology, instead of superintelligence. Read here: knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...

Jackie Robinson was a radical – don’t listen to the sanitized version of history Years before Colin Kaepernick was born, Robinson wrote, ‘I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a Black man in a white world.’

After Jackie Robinson hung up his cleats in 1957, he became a constant presence on picket lines and at #civilrights rallies.

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#JackieRobinsonDay #JackieRobinson #history

Congress, not the president, decides on government spending. @democracyeditor.bsky.social explains the basic facts on how the ‘power of the purse’ works:

DOGE threat: How government data would give an AI company extraordinary power As DOGE taps into sensitive federal agency data repositories, many people fear what could happen to the data. One little-discussed but hugely consequential possibility: fueling Elon Musk’s xAI company...

If Musk were to funnel government data collected by DOGE to xAI, what would that mean?

Trump is the kinglike president many feared when arguing over the US Constitution in 1789 – and his address to Congress showed it When the US Constitution was written, many people − from those who wrote the document to those on the outside who read it − believed that endowing the president with kinglike powers was dangerous.

Trump is the kinglike president many feared when arguing over the US Constitution in 1789 – and his address to Congress showed it

DOGE Typhoon

What’s happening on RedNote? A media scholar explains the app TikTok users are fleeing to – and the cultural moment unfolding there A digital media scholar and longtime RedNote user gives a firsthand account of US and Chinese social media users interacting on the app.

Media researcher Jianqing Chen, a longtime RedNote user, gives a firsthand account of TikTok "refugees" interacting with native users on the Chinese app. "Even in a world increasingly fractured by platforms, misinformation and political divisions, unexpected connections can still blossom."

Logging off life but living on: How AI is redefining death, memory and immortality Ethical and legal issues around death in the digital age are thorny enough dealing with social media accounts. AI puts the notion of a digital afterlife into overdrive.

From interactive funeral experiences to digital chatbots of the deceased, technology is blurring the line between life and afterlife. Marketing professors weigh in on the implications for #grief, memory, and immortality: https://buff.ly/4fPSRfE #AI #death #estateplanning

Prof. Jay Feinman’s first public writing since Luigi Mangioni allegedly wrote “Delay” and “Deny” on his bullets

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Noam Chomsky at 96: The linguist, educator, philosopher and public thinker has had a massive intellectual and moral influence Noam Chomsky’s notion of the human instinct for freedom ties together his many intellectual pursuits, from educating creative, independent citizens to rejecting social and economic hierarchies.

Noam Chomsky turned 96 today.

How right-wing media is like improv theater Improv theater is known for improvisation, audience participation and riffing on memes and stories circulating on social and traditional media – all hallmarks of right-wing media.

Danielle Lee Tomson and Kate Starbird of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public describe one of the reasons the right-wing media ecosystem has been so effective: It's a lot like improv theater.

The apocalypse that wasn’t: AI was everywhere in 2024’s elections, but deepfakes and misinformation were only part of the picture Like it or not, AI is now part and parcel of elections, from helping with mundane campaign functions to enabling politicians to speak to constituents in multiple languages at once.

AI is now part and parcel of elections, from helping with mundane campaign functions to enabling politicians to speak to constituents in multiple languages at once. Deepfakes, however, were not a big part of the disinformation campaigns in 2024. Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders break it down.

AI harm is often behind the scenes and builds over time – a legal scholar explains how the law can adapt to respond The damage AI algorithms cause is not easily remedied. Breaking algorithmic harms into four categories results in pieces that better align with the law and points the way to better regulation.

Tech law scholar Sylvia Lu explains how the law can more effectively address the cumulative, often hidden harms from AI.

Just a point of clarification: that article is by The Conversation UK, not The Conversation US. Different newsrooms with different approaches.