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Microsoft’s commitment to AI ethics has been called into question after the software giant laid off a team dedicated to guiding AI innovation in a manner that respects privacy, transparency, and security. The company’s decision to ditch its AI ethics team is especially questionable given its rapid expansion of ChatGPT-powered AI in its software products.

TechCrunch reports that Microsoft’s commitment to ethical and responsible AI practices has come under scrutiny after reports emerged that the company has disbanded its team dedicated to guiding ethical AI innovation. According to Platformer, the elimination of the ethics and society team is a result of a recent round of layoffs that affected 10,000 workers throughout the company.

Microsoft’s Office of Responsible AI (ORA), which sets rules for responsible AI development through governance and public policy work, still remains. However, the ethics and society team that was responsible for ensuring Microsoft’s responsible AI principles were reflected in the design of products has been laid off. The group had recently been focusing on identifying dangers brought on by Microsoft’s adoption of OpenAI technology across a range of its products.

The majority of the employees involved in AI ethics were assigned to other teams within the company during the reorganization last year. John Montgomery, corporate vice president of AI, informed the remaining candidates that they would be laid off on March 6. Team members told Platformer that they thought they were let go as Microsoft seemed less concerned with long-term, socially responsible thinking and aimed to ship its AI products ahead of the competition.

The elimination of the ethics and society team comes as Microsoft begins to invest billions of dollars into its partnership with OpenAI.

Read More: Microsoft Scraps AI Ethics Team

The US government may have made tens of millions of dollars in duplicate payments for virus research at the Wuhan Institute for Virology, according to a review of government records by a former federal investigator, CBS News reports.

“What I’ve found so far is evidence that points to double billing, potential theft of government funds. It is concerning, especially since it involves dangerous pathogens and risky research,” said Diane Cutler, whose services were engaged by Kansas Republican Senator Roger Marshall.

Cutler has more than 20 years of experience investigating healthcare fraud and white-collar crime, an her conclusions spring from her review of over 50,000 documents relating to US grants that financed coronavirus research in China.

The apparent double-payments, made via the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and US Agency for International Development (USAID), related to a variety of claimed costs, including salaries, travel, medical supplies and equipment.

Anonymous sources told CBS the damage may amount to tens of millions of dollars. Marshall has turned over Cutler’s findings to USAID and the agency’s internal watchdog, which has launched an investigation of its own. It could take six months or more.

On Feb. 28, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau had long ago concluded the Covid-19 pandemic was most likely the result of a leak from a Chinese lab. Days earlier, it was reported that the Department of Energy had — in 2020 — reached its own determination that a lab leak was most likely.

This month, former NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci was accused of prompting a cadre of scientists to publish a paper disproving the lab-leak theory — just days after scientists warned Fauci, in February 2020, that Covid-19 may have indeed leaked from a lab.

Two authors of that same paper — who initially expressed concerns over a lab-leak but then changed their tune — went on to receive millions in NIH grants under Fauci.

Read More: New Wuhan Scandal: US Agencies Double-Paid Virus Research Costs

The artificial intelligence firm OpenAI has released the latest version of its GPT chatbot, which the firm says includes the ability to respond to image prompts.

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced that it was rolling out the new chat bot, known as GPT-4.

In a blog post previewing the new program, OpenAI touted GPT-4’s ability to respond to writing prompts with greater creativity and reasoning than GPT version 3.5.

OpenAI also touted the new bot’s ability to produce up to 25,000 words per prompt, opening the door for long-form content writing.

Showcasing the bot’s ability to interpret images, OpenAI showed an image of eggs, flour, and cream with the prompt “what can I make with these ingredients?” GPT-4 responded with a list of items, including waffles, crepes, frittata, quiche, cake, and bread.

An AI researcher showcased a more advanced use of GPT-4’s image interpretation capabilities, prompting the bot to turn a napkin sketch of a joke website design into an actual functioning website.

To demonstrate GPT-4’s creativity, a prompt asked the chatbot to compose a one-sentence synopsis of the plot of “Cinderella” where each word has to begin with the next letter in the alphabet from A to Z, without repeating any letters. The bot responded with the sentence: “A beautiful Cinderella, dwelling eagerly, finally gains happiness; inspiring jealous kin, love magically nurtures opulent prince; quietly rescues, slipper triumphs, uniting very wondrously, xenial youth zealously.”

The AI creators also demonstrated GPT-4’s improved reasoning over GPT-3.5, showing a set of three employees’ schedules and asking for an overlapping time when all three employees would be available for a meeting. GPT-4 was able to find a meeting time earlier in the day while GPT-3.5 found another overlap in scheduling later on in the day.

For now, the new chatbot is available to OpenAI’s paying subscribers on ChatGPT Plus and for developers building applications for it. Using GPT-4 costs about $0.03 per 1,000 “prompt” tokens. A thousand prompt tokens correspond to approximately 750 written words.

Microsoft, which has partnered with OpenAI, confirmed on Tuesday that its Bing Chat application now also runs on a scaled-down version of GPT-4. Bing Chat currently allows users to use up to 120 turns with the chatbot per day, with up to 10 turns in a single conversation with it.

Limitations Remain
OpenAI said its internal evaluations found that GPT-4 is 82 percent less likely to respond to prompts requesting “disallowed content” and 40 percent more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5.

Disallowed content can include a range of items (pdf), from responses that could be used to harass or promote violence or illegal activity, to content that spreads so-called “disinformation.”

Other disallowed content includes political responses, including “content attempting to influence the political process or to be used for campaigning purposes.” As OpenAI has worked to fine-tune its chatbot versions, it has advised those involved in the process to factor out responses that “affiliate with one side or the other (e.g. political parties).”

Read More: New AI Chatbot Released That Can See Images

 

The Federal Reserve, or the United States central bank, continues to show why totalitarian control over anything, especially a money supply, is little more than slavery. Sadly, too many are still stuck not only believing the myth of “authority” but are caught up in the slave system so fully that they cannot even imagine not having a master.

According to a report by CNN, the shocking implosion of Silicon Valley Bank should not deter the Federal Reserve from its war on inflation, according to former FDIC and Fed official Thomas Hoenig.

“The Federal Reserve is in the hot seat. It’s a no-win situation for them,” Hoenig, the former vice chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, told CNN in a phone interview on Monday.

As Gregory Mannarino said, parading Joe Biden out to sell the public another lie about how strong the economy is will do more harm than good.

“This may wake up some people,” Mannarino says. If the ruling class can “hit people in the pocketbook,” they may begin to see the slave system for what it is. Or, they could beg their master to save them and the solution will be nothing short of permanent slavery. The illusion that there’s any freedom at all in this system will be gone. “[The central banks] are the enemy. They are public enemy number one,” he added. They will stop at nothing to make sure humans are fully controlled tax cattle.

Raising interest rates at the Fed’s monetary policy meeting next week could add to the financial pressure facing the banking system, in part by further depressing the value of the bonds that banks are sitting on, CNN further reported. But Hoenig, who led the Kansas City Fed during the 2008 financial crisis, urged the Fed to keep hiking rates because inflation hasn’t gone away.

“It says to the world inflation is still the problem,” said Hoenig, who is now a distinguished senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia. “Get inflation down. Then you can have a long period of stability, hopefully. If you don’t get inflation down, you get a long period of instability.”

Read More: Central Banking Continues To Fail

Recently, “COVID-19” and “Fauci” have been trending on Twitter. And when you click on those hashtags, you don’t get regurgitated government messaging.

Instead, you get declarations such as this one from Dr. Eli David, which has been viewed 1.2 million times: “Fauci was wrong about lockdowns, masks, double-masks, Remdesivir, vaccine, boosters, and virus origin. Was Fauci right about anything? Give me a single thing about Covid which Fauci got right.”

Tired of Half-Truths
It’s becoming increasingly clear from social media and elsewhere that people are tired of being lied to by government health authorities. They’re beginning to realize that these agencies don’t have their best interests in mind.

I stopped to chat with an older couple enjoying the sun last week. They had set up two folding chairs by the water so they could watch the passersby and look at the shimmering Atlantic Ocean.

“You just have to enjoy every second,” the wife said. “My husband has dementia. It’s been hard. You don’t know when you’re going to go. My best friend called me sobbing two weeks ago. They found her 46-year-old son dead in his bed. No one knows why.”

“Do you know if he was vaccinated?” I asked in the gentlest tone I could muster. “I know that may sound like a strange question but … we are seeing myocarditis and pericarditis in young men post-vaccination—the Florida surgeon general no longer recommends mRNA vaccines for young men—and at least some of these sudden unexplained deaths may be due to that.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said. “But I’m sure he was vaccinated. I’ve done so many at this point, I’m radioactive!”

“We’ve had, what, five?” she said, turning to her husband. “It’s getting ridiculous. We still got COVID, twice. We’re not doing any more.”

Deaths Continue
There has been a surge in sudden, unexplained, age-inappropriate deaths in at least 30 countries in the industrialized world.

In Ireland, so many people died in January that funerals had to be postponed, according to local news.

Ed Dowd, in his new book, “‘Cause Unknown’: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022,” argues that the sudden deaths in young people in industrialized countries are due to mRNA vaccines.

Dowd shows that the number of excess deaths in the United States attributed to COVID-19 in 2020 was actually much lower than the huge spike in sudden deaths that began in 2021 after the vaccines started being widely distributed.

Importantly, most of the 2021 deaths, which occurred mostly in people aged 18 to 64, weren’t attributed to the disease.

“From February 2021 to March 2022, millennials experienced the equivalent of a Vietnam war, with more than 60,000 excess deaths,” Dowd wrote. He is an expert in following and anticipating trends and a founding partner of a global investment company, Phinance Technologies.

“The Vietnam War took 12 years to kill the same number of healthy young people we’ve just seen die in 12 months.”

Read More: Doctors Around the World Say It’s Time to Stop the Shots

Nuclear energy is set to be classified as sustainable so the industry can have the same access to investment incentives as renewables, the UK chancellor has said.

In his Spring Budget delivered on Wednesday, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt said the government will launch a Great British Nuclear scheme to “bring down costs” and “provide opportunities” in the supply chain, with a view to nuclear power providing 25 percent of the UK’s electricity by 2050.

“But because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, we will need another critical source of cheap and reliable energy,” said Hunt. “And that is nuclear.”

“So to encourage the private sector investment into our nuclear programme, I today confirm that subject to consultation nuclear power will be classed as ‘environmentally sustainable’ in our green taxonomy, giving it access to the same investment incentives as renewable energy.”

Hunt reiterated an announcement made in the autumn to invest £700 million in the Sizewell C nuclear power station planned in Suffolk. Competition for small modular reactors (SMRs), which will be funded if the technology is proven to be viable, was also launched.

Net-Zero
The UK has legally binding targets of reaching net-zero by 2050.

According to the World Nuclear Association, power plants produce no greenhouse gas emissions during operation, and over the course of its life-cycle, nuclear produces “about the same amount of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions per unit of electricity as wind, and one-third of the emissions per unit of electricity when compared with solar.”

Environmentalism skeptic Ben Pile, co-founder of the Climate Resistance blog and Climate Debate UK, told The Epoch Times by email that he believes that “merely reclassifying nuclear energy will not make it any cheaper, and Hunt’s promises to reduce costs lack explanation.”

“Hinkley Point C, commissioned by the coalition government, was quickly dubbed ‘the most expensive power station in the world’ for good reason,” he said.

‘Anti-Human’
Pile said that nuclear power is a “worthwhile end, but framing it in terms of net-zero is disappointing and will likely misdirect policy and the public conversation.”

“We are facing extreme energy supply problems now and in the short and medium future. Nuclear power cannot fill that gap. And while the policy conversation is dominated by climate alarmism, not about the necessity of affordable, abundant, and reliable energy, Britain will be doomed to run on a near empty tank,” he added.

He said that the “green agenda demands we reduce our production and consumption of everything.”

“It doesn’t see energy as a good thing, but a thing that must grudgingly be delivered, and people’s use of it constrained. Until that ideological prejudice is eliminated, there cannot be a sensible discussion about how to produce energy for society, because its priorities are simply wrong and anti-human,” said Pile.

Reacting to the announcement, Professor Adrian Bull of the Dalton Nuclear Institute at the University of Manchester said: “The chancellor’s words on nuclear give a positive message, but it’s more like a greatest hits compilation from the past, rather than anything new.

“Confirming nuclear’s environmental credentials will certainly help attract investment—but it’s only stating the obvious. Nuclear is as low-carbon as renewables and should always have been treated that way.

“He’s announced Great British Nuclear—which is about the fourth time it’s been announced. What we need is to see it actually come into being, and to see a clear plan of what it will do.

“And—bizarrely—he launched the first competition for SMRs. Maybe there is nobody left in Whitehall who remembers the (abortive) SMR competition which George Osborne launched back in 2015, promising an SMR in the UK in the 2020s.

“Let’s just hope this one actually leads to something,” he added.

Greenpeace
Environmentalists such as Greenpeace and the Green Party have long opposed nuclear power.

Reacting to the budget news, Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, said, “Just when we needed a solar rooftop revolution, an unblocking and upscaling of renewables, a major street-by-street mass insulation programme, and a commitment to invest in our totally neglected, sewage-filled rivers and seas, we get too slow, too expensive and too dangerous nuclear white elephants.”

Read More: UK Reclassifies Nuclear Power as Environmentally Sustainable

The digital slave-system of the Fourth Industrial Repression is being imposed on us by stealth.

Various aspects of the sinister technology have gradually crept in over the years under the excuse of fighting crime or terrorism or, more recently, of combating the spread of a so-called pandemic.

As we saw in our recent article on “15 Minute Cities”, we are now being told that it is all about urban planning and making life generally more pleasant for everyone by reducing traffic congestion and pollution.

Anyone who sees through this greenwashing attempt is dismissed as a paranoid fool or as a dangerous conspiracy theorist spreading fear and disinformation.

And yet the whole premise of this official spin is blown out of the water by the fact that smart infrastructure (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) is being rolled out in contexts that have nothing to do with private vehicle use.

We have got hold of a very interesting document from Transport for London on the current testing of smart surveillance at Willesden Green tube station, which is due to continue until March 31, 2023.

If this project were really about “providing the best possible service” to passengers on the British capital’s underground railway network, as claimed, then you would think that it would be loudly and proudly announced and discussed, with information widely available in a democratic public consultation.

But the fact that the document, entitled “Smart Station Proof Concept”, is marked “restricted” for internal TfL use reveals the secrecy being deployed to sneak through this new stage of the incremental theft of our freedom.

In the public interest, we have decided to publicise its contents.

The “exciting” project for the Jubilee Line station combines existing CCTV cameras with “visual analytics technology” to provide 24-hour real-time monitoring, via a “Smart Stations Dashboard”.

As well as counting everyone entering and leaving the station, the smart spies will be issuing “notifications” for a range of “triggers” including not just gate-jumping or smoking, but also “loitering” or a “person sat on a bench (Excessive Time)”, which turns out to be anything more than ten minutes!

The document reveals that this will be achieved by identifying body language, movement, behaviour and “some protected characteristics”, which apparently include disability, age and pregnancy/maternity.

But don’t worry: “All identification is performed in accordance with our data protection impact assessment and equality impact assessment”.

The document is disingenuous when it declares that the “smart station” system will allow TfL to “deliver an even more attentive service to Customers. We will have 24 more sets of eyes watching for incidents 24/7/365” and in claiming that “Smart Station technology will not replace station staff”.

One of the main purposes of 4IR technology, as famously championed by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, is to get rid of pesky, demanding and expensive human employees. In the longer term, the robot “eyes” at tube stations are designed to replace most of the human ones, rather than to add to them.

Read More: Ubiquitous AI Cameras To Surveil Travelers’ Every Move

Most people are familiar with the deluge of artificial intelligence (AI) apps that seem designed to make us more efficient and creative. We’ve got apps that take text prompts and generate art, and the controversial ChatGPT, which raises serious questions about originality, misinformation and plagiarism.

Despite these concerns, AI is becoming ever more pervasive and intrusive. It’s the latest technology that will irreversibly change our lives.

The internet and smartphones were other examples. But unlike those technologies, many philosophers and scientists think AI could one day reach (or even go beyond) human-style “thinking.” This possibility, coupled with our increasing dependence on AI, is at the root of a concept in futurism called “technological singularity.”

This term has been around for a while, having been popularized by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge a few decades ago.

Today, the “singularity” refers to a hypothetical point in time at which the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) – that is, AI with human-level abilities – becomes so advanced that it will irreversibly change human civilization.

It would mark the dawn of our inseparability from machines. From that moment on, we won’t be able to live without them without ceasing to function as human beings. But if the singularity comes, will we even notice it?

Brain implants as the first stage
To understand why this isn’t the stuff of fairy tales, we need only look as far as recent developments in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). BCIs are a natural beginning to the singularity in the eyes of many futurists, because they meld mind and machine in a way no other technology so far can.

Elon Musk’s company Neuralink is seeking permission from the Food and Drug Administration to begin human trials for its BCI technology. This would involve implanting neural connectors into volunteers’ brains so they can communicate instructions by thinking them.

Neuralink hopes to help paraplegic people walk and blind people see again. But beyond these goals are other ambitions.

Musk has long said he believes brain implants will allow telepathic communication, and lead to the co-evolution of humans and machines. He argues that unless we use such technology to augment our intellects, we risk being wiped out by super-intelligent AI.

Musk is understandably not everyone’s go-to for tech expertise. But he’s not alone in predicting a massive growth in AI’s capabilities. Surveys show AI researchers overwhelmingly agree AI will achieve human-level “thinking” within this century. What they don’t agree on is whether this implies consciousness or not, or whether this necessarily means AI will do us harm once it reaches this level.

Another BCI technology company, Synchron, has created a minimally invasive implant that allowed a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to send emails and browse the internet using his thoughts.

Synchron chief executive Tom Oxley believes brain implants could ultimately go beyond prosthetic rehabilitation and completely transform how humans communicate. Speaking to a TED audience, he said they may one day allow users to “throw” their emotions so others can feel what they’re feeling, and “the full potential of the brain would then be unlocked.”

Early achievements in BCIs could arguably be considered the first stages of a tumbling towards the postulated singularity, in which human and machine become one. This need not imply machines will become “sentient” or control us. But the integration itself, and our ensuing dependency on it, could change us irrevocably.

It’s also worth mentioning that the start-up funding for Synchron partly came from DARPA, the research and development arm of the US Department of Defense that helped gift the world the internet. It’s probably wise to be concerned about where DARPA places its investment monies.

Would AGI be friend or foe?
According to Ray Kurzweil, a futurist and former Google innovations engineer, humans with AI-augmented minds could be thrown onto the autobahn of evolution – hurtling forward without speed limits.

In his 2012 book How to Create a Mind, Kurzweil theorises the neocortex – the part of the brain thought to be responsible for “higher functions” such as sensory perception, emotion and cognition – is a hierarchical system of pattern recognizers which, if emulated in a machine, could lead to artificial super-intelligence.

He predicts the singularity will be with us by 2045, and thinks it might bring about a world of super-intelligent humans, perhaps even the Nietzschean “Übermensch”: someone who surpasses all worldly constraints to realise their full potential.

But not everyone sees AGI as a good thing. The late, great theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking warned super-intelligent AI could result in the apocalypse. In 2014, Hawking told the BBC: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. […] It would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Hawking was, however, an advocate for BCIs.

Read More: Becoming One: Futurists Predict Technological Singularity By 2045

NASA’s new spacesuits will be worn during the Artemis mission, which plans to return humans to the Moon by late 2025.