Author: nick
In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, a coalition of U.S. civil society groups call AI giants’ mass book buying and destruction an effort to “corner the essential inputs of AI development.” Timeless books. (Lin Kristensen /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 2.0) By Jake JohnsonCommon Dreams A coalition of American civil society groups is calling for a federal investigation into reports that artificial intelligence giants are mass-purchasing physical books, scanning them to train their AI models, and destroying them without regard for historical artifacts or the public good. In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Friday, the coalition…
With all the recent hype around The Telepathy Tapes podcast, people might think that claims of telepathic abilities in nonspeaking individuals with profound autism are new. They are not. They are decades old. FC (used here as an umbrella term for all facilitator-dependent techniques) is, purportedly, a communication technique in which the previously silenced thoughts of individuals with profound autism can be accessed through “spelling” while using a simple letter board. Proponents claim FC works primarily through a trust-bond between a literate assistant (called a facilitator), who provides physical and emotional support, and the nonspeaking individual. Critics of the technique…
Today, the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) announces the launch of seven refined research opportunities aimed at hacking humans, nature, and the climate. ARIA has been busy refining its approach to research opportuntities by consolidating 14 spaces into seven. Secure brain-to-brain communications and memory sharing, flying suits programmed from living systems, sensors that can smell like dogs, cloud brightening for weather manipulation, and a whole lot more are all on ARIA’s agenda. “We are announcing seven new opportunity spaces that represent a bringing together of the previous 14 opportunity spaces that we had before. We have identified patterns that were…
The Chicago Teachers Union Sues Its Critics Source link
Janine Jackson FAIR This week on CounterSpin: It was not a shock when Donald Trump’s Justice Department greenlit the merger of Paramount—owned by the scion of the Trump-adjacent Ellison family—with Warner Bros Discovery. Who cares if a single entity (that loves Donald Trump and all he stands for) controls a vast empire of the movies, cable TV and streaming services we have access to? It turns out a lot of people care, and that’s why the merger, presented as a done deal weeks ago, is actually on the ropes. We’ll get a state of play from Jessica Gonzalez, co-CEO of the public advocacy group Free…
The Sad Decline of the Great American Town Hall Source link
By creating “Sanctuary Zones” that refuse to cooperate with ICE or police, a coalition in Atlanta is building the infrastructure to practice real community safety. Stephanie Guilloud Waging Nonviolence Atlanta community organizer Bassey Etuk opened a community defense workshop in June with a stark observation, and heads nodded around the crowded room. “Atlanta was a sanctuary city until the governor of Georgia made it illegal in 2009. Now Atlanta is Cop City,” he said. From California to Kenya, whenever I say I’m based in Atlanta, people immediately bring up Cop City, the police training facility that sparked years of protest and…
Belief in telepathy in autistic individuals, as promoted in The Telepathy Tapes podcast, stems from forces of modernity so inexorable that, were we to rewind the gears of history and try it all again, we’d end up right back where we are. The forces I’m implicating are disparate: the spread of literacy, the rise of the nuclear family, the disability rights and neurodiversity movements, trends in modern education, the accumulating research on autism, the “god-shaped hole” caused by growing secularism, the rise of mass media and then social media, the tendency of methodologies to evolve through implicit learning mechanisms and…
The years 2024 and 2025 must have been a heady experience for documentary filmmaker Ky Dickens. In September 2024, she began releasing the ten-episode first season of her The Telepathy Tapes podcast. By December, the show started to appear on year-end lists of the best podcasts of 2024. Then lightning struck on Christmas Day. Based on hearing just two episodes, Joe Rogan (the undisputed king of podcasting, with millions of followers, who on this occasion happened to be wearing an elf costume) gave a brief favorable review of The Telepathy Tapes and expressed his belief that telepathy is real. Suddenly…
Are They Democrat Socialists or Just Deadbeat Scammers? Source link