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Lasrick writes:
A court ruling on whether bots have First Amendment free speech rights remains in the realm of conjecture, but as a new law in California will soon force bots that engage in electioneering or marketing to declare their non-human identity, it may be coming soon. Laurent Sacharoff, a law professor at the University of Arkansas, thinks the people programming bots may want US courts to answer the question on free speech rights for bots in the affirmative. Take a hypothetical bot that engages a voter around a shared concern like motherhood, for instance. "If it has to say, ‘Well look, I’m not really a mother, I’m a chatbot mother, a mother of other chatbots. And when I say I feel your pain, I don’t actually have feelings.’ That’s just not going to be very effective,” Sacharoff says.
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Dan Drollette writes:
Dire as it is, the latest IPCC report is actually too optimistic — it ignores the risk of self-reinforcing climate feedbacks pushing the planet into chaos beyond human control. So says a team of climate experts, including the winner of the 1995 Nobel for his work on depletion of the ozone layer.
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Gayle BAS writes:
Nearly three-quarters of American Facebook users have changed how they use the social media app in the past year, following a barrage of scandals involving the abuse of personal data, foreign interference in U.S. elections and the spread of hateful or harassing content on the platform.
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Gayle BAS writes:
Proponents say that floating nuclear plants have major advantages over land-based power plants: They have easy access to cooling water and can be quickly installed near coastal cities with rapidly growing energy demands. And unlike other types of energy that produce relatively few climate-altering emissions, nuclear power plants can run 24/7.
But as with onshore nuclear reactors, the closely related issues of safety and economics could be showstoppers.
