Category: Silicon Valley

Sea lions and dolphins are being sickened by toxic algae off the coast of California, where hundreds of animals have washed ashore. Mike O’Sullivan visited the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach, California, where workers are rescuing and treating the ailing animals.
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The White House on Friday announced that the Biden administration had reached a voluntary agreement with seven companies building artificial intelligence products to establish guidelines meant to ensure the technology is developed safely.

“These commitments are real, and they’re concrete,” President Joe Biden said in comments to reporters. “They’re going to help … the industry fulfill its fundamental obligation to Americans to develop safe, secure and trustworthy technologies that benefit society and uphold our values and our shared values.”

The companies that sent leaders to the White House were Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI. The firms are all developing systems called large language models (LLMs), which are trained using vast amounts of text, usually taken from the publicly accessible internet, and use predictive analysis to respond to queries conversationally.

In a statement, OpenAI, which created the popular ChatGPT service, said, “This process, coordinated by the White House, is an important step in advancing meaningful and effective AI governance, both in the U.S. and around the world.”

Safety, security, trust

The agreement, released by the White House on Friday morning, outlines three broad areas of focus: assuring that AI products are safe for public use before they are made widely available; building products that are secure and cannot be misused for unintended purposes; and establishing public trust that the companies developing the technology are transparent about how they work and what information they gather.

As part of the agreement, the companies pledged to conduct internal and external security testing before AI systems are made public in order to ensure they are safe for public use, and to share information about safety and security with the public.

Further, the commitment obliges the companies to keep strong safeguards in place to prevent the inadvertent or malicious release of technology and tools not intended for the general public, and to support third-party efforts to detect and expose any such breaches.

Finally, the agreement sets out a series of obligations meant to build public trust. These include assurances that AI-created content will always be identified as such; that companies will offer clear information about their products’ capabilities and limitations; that companies will prioritize mitigating the risk of potential harms of AI, including bias, discrimination and privacy violations; and that companies will focus their research on using AI to “help address society’s greatest challenges.”

The administration said that it is at work on an executive order that would ask Congress to develop legislation to “help America lead the way in responsible innovation.”

Just a start

Experts contacted by VOA all said that the agreement marked a positive step on the road toward effective regulation of emerging AI technology, but they also warned that there is far more work to be done, both in understanding the potential harm these powerful models might cause and finding ways to mitigate it.

“No one knows how to regulate AI — it’s very complex and is constantly changing,” said Susan Ariel Aaronson, a professor at George Washington University and the founder and director of the research institute Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub.

“The White House is trying very hard to regulate in a pro-innovative way,” Aaronson told VOA. “When you regulate, you always want to balance risk — protecting people or businesses from harm — with encouraging innovation, and this industry is essential for U.S. economic growth.”

She added, “The United States is trying and so I want to laud the White House for these efforts. But I want to be honest. Is it sufficient? No.”

‘Conversational computing’

It’s important to get this right, because models like ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Anthropic’s Claude will increasingly be built into the systems that people use to go about their everyday business, said Louis Rosenberg, the CEO and chief scientist of the firm Unanimous AI. 

“We’re going into an age of conversational computing, where we’re going to talk to our computers and our computers are going to talk back,” Rosenberg told VOA. “That’s how we’re going to engage search engines. That’s how we’re going to engage apps. That’s how we’re going to engage productivity tools.”

Rosenberg, who has worked in the AI field for 30 years and holds hundreds of related patents, said that when it comes to LLMs being so tightly integrated into our day-to-day life, we still don’t know everything we should be concerned about.

“Many of the risks are not fully understood yet,” he said. Conventional computer software is very deterministic, he said, meaning that programs are built to do precisely what programmers tell them to do. By contrast, the exact way in which large language models operate can be opaque even to their creators.

The models can display unintended bias, can parrot false or misleading information, and can say things that people find offensive or even dangerous. In addition, many people will interact with them through a third-party service, such as a website, that integrates the large language model into its offering, but can tailor its responses in ways that might be malicious or manipulative.

Many of these problems will become apparent only after these systems have been deployed at scale, by which point they will already be in use by the public.

“The problems have not yet surfaced at a level where policymakers can address them head-on,” Rosenberg said. “The thing that is, I think, positive, is that at least policymakers are expecting the problems.”

More stakeholders needed 

Benjamin Boudreaux, a policy analyst with the RAND Corporation, told VOA that it was unclear how much actual change in the companies’ behavior Friday’s agreement would generate.

“Many of the things that the companies are agreeing to here are things that the companies already do, so it’s not clear that this agreement really shifts much of their behavior,” Boudreaux said. “And so I think there is still going to be a need for perhaps a more regulatory approach or more action from Congress and the White House.”

Boudreaux also said that as the administration fleshes out its policy, it will have to broaden the range of participants in the conversation.

“This is just a group of private sector entities; this doesn’t include the full set of stakeholders that need to be involved in discussions about the risks of these systems,” he said. “The stakeholders left out of this include some of the independent evaluators, civil society organizations, nonprofit groups and the like, that would actually do some of the risk analysis and risk assessment.”
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Japan and India have signed an agreement for the joint development of semiconductors, in what appears to be another indication of how global businesses are reconfiguring post-pandemic supply chains as China loses its allure for foreign companies.

India’s Ashwini Vaishnaw, minister for railways, communications, and electronics and information technology, and Japan’s minister of economy, trade and industry, Yasutoshi Nishimura, signed the deal Thursday in New Delhi.

The memorandum covers “semiconductor design, manufacturing, equipment research, talent development and [will] bring resilience in the semiconductor supply chain,” Vaishnaw said.

Nishimura said after his meeting with Vaishnaw that “India has excellent human resources” in fields such as semiconductor design.

“By capitalizing on each other’s strengths, we want to push forward with concrete projects as early as possible,” Nishimura told a news conference, Kyodo News reported.  

Andreas Kuehn, a senior fellow at the American office of Observer Research Foundation, an Indian think tank, told VOA Mandarin: “Japan has extensive experience in this industry and understands the infrastructure in this field at a broad level. It can be an important partner in advancing India’s semiconductor ambitions.”

Shift from China

Foreign companies have been shifting their manufacturing away from China over the past decade, prompted by increasing labor costs.

More recently, Beijing’s push for foreign companies to share their technologies and data has increased uneasiness with China’s business climate, according to surveys of U.S. and European businesses there.

The discomfort stems from a 2021 data security law that Beijing updated in April and put into effect on July 1. Its broad anti-espionage language does not define what falls under China’s national security or interests. 

After taking office in 2014, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a “Make in India” initiative with the goal of turning India into a global manufacturing center with an expanded chip industry.

The initiative is not entirely about making India a self-sufficient economy, but more about welcoming investors from countries with similar ideas. Japan and India are part of the QUAD security framework, along with the United States and Australia, which aims to strengthen cooperation as a group, as well as bilaterally between members, to maintain peace and stability in the region.

Jagannath Panda, director of the Stockholm Center for South Asian and Indo-Pacific Affairs of the Institute for Security and Development Policy, said that the international community “wants a safe region where the semiconductor industry can continue to supply the global market. This chain of linkages is critical, and India is at the heart of the Indo-Pacific region” — a location not lost on chip companies in the United States, Taiwan and Japan that are reevaluating supply chain security and reducing their dependence on China.

Looking ahead

Panda told VOA Mandarin: “The COVID pandemic has proved that we should not rely too much on China. [India’s development of the chip industry] is also to prepare India for the next half century. Unless countries with similar ideas such as the United States and Japan cooperate effectively, India cannot really develop its semiconductor industry.”

New Delhi and Washington signed a memorandum of understanding in March to advance cooperation in the semiconductor field.

During Modi’s visit to the United States in June, he and President Joe Biden announced a cooperation agreement to coordinate semiconductor incentive and subsidy plans between the two countries.

Micron, a major chip manufacturer, confirmed on June 22 that it will invest as much as $800 million in India to build a chip assembly and testing plant.

Applied Materials said in June that it plans to invest $400 million over four years to build an engineering center in Bangalore, Reuters reported.  The new center is expected to be located near the company’s existing facility in Bengaluru and is likely to support more than $2 billion of planned investments and create 500 new advanced engineering jobs, the company said.

Experts said that although the development of India’s chip industry will not pose a challenge to China in the short term, China’s increasingly unfriendly business environment will prompt international semiconductor companies to consider India as one of the destinations for transferring production capacity.

“China is still a big player in the semiconductor industry, especially traditional chips, and we shouldn’t underestimate that. I don’t think that’s going to go away anytime soon. The world depends on this capacity,” Kuehn said. 

He added: “For multinational companies, China has become a more difficult business environment to operate in. We are likely to see them make other investments outside China after a period of time, which may compete with China’s semiconductor industry, especially in Southeast Asia. India may also play a role in this regard.” 

Bo Gu contributed to this report.
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The World Health Organization warns dengue fever is spreading to more regions and countries around the world due to the increased movement of people, urbanization, and climate-related issues.

“About half of the world’s population is at risk of dengue,” Raman Velayudhan, a top official of the WHO’s global program on the control of neglected tropical diseases, told journalists at a briefing Friday in Geneva. “Dengue affects about 129 countries. We estimate about 100 to 400 million cases are reported every year. This is basically an estimate.”

The disease, which is spread by the Aedes species of mosquito, thrives mainly in tropical and subtropical climates. WHO reports it has grown dramatically worldwide in recent decades, with cases increasing from half a million in 2000 to more than 4.2 million in 2022.

Last year, the Latin American region reported 2.8 million cases and 1,280 deaths. Just seven months into 2023, the region has already matched those figures, with nearly three million cases and an almost equal number of deaths. 

Velayudhan said dengue is a global disease, noting that the mosquito which causes dengue has been found in 24 European countries. 

He said that in Africa there recently have been reports of more than 2,000 cases and 45 deaths in Sudan, as well as new reports within the past week of dengue being present in Egypt. 

He said the presence of dengue in Africa is of special concern, noting that the figure of over 200,000 cases reported annually from the continent is likely an underestimate. 

He added that the reporting of dengue cases in Africa must be improved.

“We know it is there,” said Velayudhan. “But it has been masked by other diseases. But now that [the battle against] malaria, in particular, has made great strides and has reduced in Africa, we have seen an increasing percent of dengue, and this is something we really encourage the governments [to address].”

He said this is already happening as the WHO is currently tracking cases of the disease reported in Sudan, Ethiopia, Senegal, Kenya, Nigeria and Sao Tome.

The monsoon season has begun in Asia, a situation that health officials find very worrying as the region accounts for about 70 percent dengue cases. The WHO has issued an alert to governments to take preventive measures to control the spread of the disease.

Velayudhan said the monsoon already has hit many of the dengue endemic regions in the Indian sub-continent, where high precipitation, increased temperature and even water scarcity favor mosquitoes and pose a real threat.

“So, we really need to be better prepared and make sure that all our health facilities are alerted and as the water recedes, we need to prevent [mosquito] breeding. And this is the key message,” he said.

He said people can protect themselves by eliminating stagnant water and other possible breeding areas around their homes. 

Most people with dengue do not have symptoms and get better in one to two weeks. However, those who develop severe cases often require hospital care. 

While there is no specific treatment for dengue, WHO says patients can be treated with medicines to lower the temperature and ease body pain.

The World Health Organization says new tools, such as diagnostics, antivirals, and vaccines for preventing and controlling dengue, are under development. Indeed, it notes one vaccine is in the market, and two are in the final phase three clinical trial and review.

Meanwhile, Velayudhan noted that the mosquito that transmits dengue tends to bite during the day. So, his advice to people is “to cover up during the day to lower their risk of being bitten and getting dengue.” 
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Environmental activists and experts are increasingly concerned about the impact that military activity by India, China and Pakistan is having on the unique biodiversity and pristine ecosystems of Ladakh, an Indian-administered region high in the Himalayas.

Simmering tensions between India and China since a deadly border confrontation in 2020 have led to a surge in military deployment, with both sides fortifying their positions to ensure territorial security.

The influx of troops, equipment and infrastructure construction for military purposes has disrupted the fragile Himalayan ecosystem. The unchecked expansion of military bases, roads, helipads and related projects has led to deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and increased air and noise pollution, the experts say.

They point to the rapid degradation of sensitive habitats, such as alpine meadows, wetlands and high-altitude forests, which are home to several endangered species, including the elusive snow leopard, Tibetan antelope and black-necked crane.

“Rare birds such as the black neck crane face disturbances in their habitats due to the heavy military presence on both the Chinese and Indian sides,” said Sonam Wangchuk, an environmentalist and past winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award – sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize of Asia.  

He and other experts explained that the military activities disrupt the natural breeding patterns, feeding habits and migration routes of these vulnerable species, threatening their survival.

The damage caused by military activity is exacerbating degradation already underway from rising global temperatures attributed in large part to the burning of fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide, trapping heat from the sun in Earth’s atmosphere.

Mountain regions like the Himalayas are rapidly changing because of the climate crisis, said Doug Weir, policy director at the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a U.K.-based charity working to develop policies that will reduce the environmental harm caused by conflicts and military activities.

Weir told VOA that military activity is estimated to account for 5.5% of all global carbon dioxide emissions.

“Increased military spending and activity help accelerate the climate crisis and the regional changes that are already readily apparent,” he said. “While India has begun to acknowledge a need to reduce its military emissions, efforts are in their infancy. China’s views on military emissions reductions remain unclear.”

Wangchuk argued in an interview that the military buildup in Ladakh is contributing significantly to the warming climate.

“The Indian side alone emits approximately 300,000 tons of CO2 [carbon dioxide] annually, considering the substantial amount of fuel transported and burned for military operations,” he said. “Similarly, the emissions would be slightly higher on the Chinese side and somewhat lower on the Pakistani side, resulting in nearly 1 million tons of CO2 being emitted each year in this triangular junction.

“Pollution doesn’t know borders,” Wangchuk added, urging governments to prioritize the well-being of soldiers and civilians alike, irrespective of their nationalities. He compared the disputes between nations “to squabbling neighbors fighting over a fence while an impending avalanche threatens them both.”

Not only the wildlife is threatened. A recent study indicated that if temperature trends continued, the Himalayan glaciers might disappear entirely, “having a significant impact on regional water supplies, hydrological processes, ecosystem services and transboundary water sharing.”

Ladakh is particularly vulnerable to the threat, Wangchuk said. “Its glaciers play a crucial role in sustaining not only the local population but also communities across northern India and northern Pakistan. Consequently, many villages are teetering on the brink of becoming climate refugees.”

In a media report last year, the village of Kumik witnessed residents abandoning their homes and relocating to other parts of Ladakh because of water scarcity.

On a more positive note, Wangchuk said efforts are underway to collaborate with the Indian army to introduce passive solar-heated shelters, which have proven effective in significantly reducing emissions.

“These innovative zero-emission buildings have been successfully tested during two harsh winters, ensuring soldiers’ warmth without relying on conventional fuel sources,” he said, calling for China and Pakistan to adopt similar environmentally friendly practices. 
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As the planet warms, mosquitoes are slowly migrating upward. 

The temperature range where malaria-carrying mosquitoes thrive is rising in elevation. Researchers have found evidence of the phenomenon from the tropical highlands of South America to the mountainous, populous regions of eastern Africa. 

Scientists now worry people living in areas once inhospitable to the insects, including the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and the mountains of eastern Ethiopia, could be newly exposed to the disease. 

“As it gets warmer at higher altitudes with climate change and all of these other environmental changes, then mosquitoes can survive higher up the mountain,” said Manisha Kulkarni, a professor and researcher studying malaria in sub-Saharan Africa at the University of Ottawa. 

Kulkarni led a study published in 2016 that found the habitat for malaria-carrying mosquitoes had expanded in the high-elevation Mount Kilimanjaro region by hundreds of square kilometers in just 10 years. Lower altitudes, in contrast, are becoming too hot for the bugs. 

The African region Kulkarni studied, which is growing in population, is close to the border of Tanzania and Kenya. Together, the two countries accounted for 6% of global malaria deaths in 2021. 

Deaths decline, still numerous

Global deaths from malaria declined by 29% from 2002 to 2021, as countries have taken more aggressive tactics in fighting the disease. However, the numbers remain high, especially in Africa where children under 5 years old account for 80% of all malaria deaths.  

The latest world malaria report from the World Health Organization recorded 247 million cases of malaria in 2021 — Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Mozambique alone accounted for almost half of those cases. 

“The link between climate change and expansion or change in mosquito distributions is real,” said Doug Norris, a specialist in mosquitoes at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was not involved in the research. 

But mosquitoes are picky about their habitat, Norris added, and the various malaria-carrying species have different preferences in temperature, humidity and amount of rainfall. Combined with the use of bed nets, insecticides and other tools, it becomes hard to pin any single trend to climate change, he said. 

Jeremy Herren, who studies malaria at the Nairobi-based International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology, said there is evidence that climate change is affecting where mosquito populations choose to live. But, he said, it is still difficult to predict how malaria will spread. 

For example, in Kenya, Herren said researchers have documented “massive shifts” in malaria in mosquitoes. A species that was once dominant is now almost impossible to find, he said. But those changes are probably not due to climate change, he said, adding that the rollout of insecticide-treated nets is one explanation for that shift. 

In general, however, mosquitoes grow faster in warmer conditions, Norris said. 

Pamela Martinez, a researcher at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, said her team’s findings on malaria trends in Ethiopia, which were published in 2021 in the journal Nature, lent more confidence to the idea that malaria and temperature — and, therefore, climate change — are linked. 

“We see that when temperature goes down, the overall trend of cases also goes down, even in the absence of intervention,” Martinez said. “That proves the case that temperature has an impact on transmission.” 
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Every few years, the Pacific Ocean gets a fever, and the symptoms spread all the way around the world. It’s happening again. El Niño is back, and it looks like it’s going to be a big one. That raises the odds of droughts in Brazil and southern Africa, and floods in East Africa and the southern United States.
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Intel Corp. has introduced a processor in China that is designed for AI deep-learning applications despite reports of the Biden administration considering additional restrictions on Chinese companies to address loopholes in chip export controls.

The chip giant’s product launch on July 11 is part of an effort by U.S. technology companies to bypass or curb government export controls to the Chinese market as the U.S. government, citing national security concerns, continues to tighten restrictions on China’s artificial intelligence industry.

CEOs of U.S. chipmakers including Intel, Qualcomm and Nvidia met with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday to urge a halt to more controls on chip exports to China, Reuters reported. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, National Economic Council director Lael Brainard and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan were among other government officials meeting with the CEOs, Reuters said.

The meeting came after China announced restrictions on the export of materials that are used to construct chips, a response to escalating efforts by Washington to curb China’s technological advances.

VOA Mandarin contacted the U.S. chipmakers for comment but has yet to receive responses.

Reuters reported Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said in June that “over the long term, restrictions prohibiting the sale of our data center graphic processing units to China, if implemented, would result in a permanent loss of opportunities for the U.S. industry to compete and lead in one of the world’s largest markets and impact on our future business and financial results.”

Before the meeting with Blinken, John Neuffer, president of the Semiconductor Industry Association, which represents the chip industry, said in a statement to The New York Times that the escalation of controls posed a significant risk to the global competitiveness of the U.S. industry.

“China is the world’s largest market for semiconductors, and our companies simply need to do business there to continue to grow, innovate and stay ahead of global competitors,” he said. “We urge solutions that protect national security, avoid inadvertent and lasting damage to the chip industry, and avert future escalations.”

According to the Times, citing five sources, the Biden administration is considering additional restrictions on the sale of high-end chips used to power artificial intelligence to China. The goal is to limit technological capacity that could aid the Chinese military while minimizing the impact such rules would have on private companies.   Such a move could speed up the tit-for-tat salvos in the U.S.-China chip war, the Times reported. 

And The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the White House was exploring how to restrict the leasing of cloud services to AI firms in China.

But the U.S. controls appear to be merely slowing, rather than stopping, China’s AI development.

Last October, the U.S. Commerce Department banned Nvidia from selling two of its most advanced AI-critical chips, the A100 and the newer H100, to Chinese customers, citing national security concerns. In November, Nvidia designed the A800 and H800 chips that are not subject to export controls for the Chinese market.

According to the Journal, the U.S. government is considering new bans on the A800 exports to China.

According to a report published in May by TrendForce, a market intelligence and professional consulting firm, the A800, like Nvidia’s H100 and A100, is already the most widely used mainstream product for AI-related computing.

Combining chips

Robert Atkinson, founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told VOA in a phone interview that although these chips are not the most advanced, they can still be used by China.  

“What you can do, though, is you can combine lesser, less powerful chips and just put more of them together. And you can still do a lot of AI processing with them. It just makes it more expensive. And it uses more energy. But the Chinese are happy to do that,” Atkinson said.

As for the Chinese use of cloud computing, Hanna Dohmen, a research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told VOA Mandarin in a phone interview that companies can rent chips through cloud service providers.  

In practice, it is similar to a pedestrian hopping on an e-share scooter or bike — she pays a fee to unlock the scooter’s key function, its wheels.

For example, Dohman said that Nvidia’s A100, which is “controlled and cannot be exported to China, per the October 7 export control regulations,” can be legally accessed by Chinese companies that “purchase services from these cloud service providers to gain virtual access to these controlled chips.”

Dohman acknowledged it is not clear how many Chinese AI research institutions and companies are using American cloud services.

“There are also Chinese regulations … on cross-border data that might prohibit or limit to what extent Chinese companies might be willing to use foreign cloud service providers outside of China to develop their AI models,” she said.

Black market chips

In another workaround, Atkinson said Chinese companies can buy black market chips. “It’s not clear to me that these export controls are going to be able to completely cut off Chinese computing capabilities. They might slow them down a bit, but I don’t think they’re going to cut them off.”

According to an as yet unpublished report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, China is already ahead of Europe in terms of the number of AI startups and is catching up with the U.S.

Although Chinese websites account for less than 2% of global network traffic, Atkinson said, Chinese government data management can make up for the lack of dialogue texts, images and videos that are essential for AI large-scale model training.

 “I do think that the Chinese will catch up and surpass the U.S. unless we take fairly serious steps,” Atkinson said.  
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Artificial intelligence was the dominant topic at the United Nations Security Council this week.

In his opening remarks at the session, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “AI will have an impact on every area of our lives” and advocated for the creation of a “new United Nations entity to support collective efforts to govern this extraordinary technology.”

Guterres said “the need for global standards and approaches makes the United Nations the ideal place for this to happen” and urged a joining of forces to “build trust for peace and security.”

“We need a race to develop AI for good,” Guterres said. “And that is a race that is possible and achievable.”

In his briefing, to the council, Guterres said the debate was an opportunity to consider the impact of artificial intelligence on peace and security “where it is already raising political, legal, ethical and humanitarian concerns.”

He also stated that while governments, large companies and organizations around the world are working on an AI strategy, “even its own designers have no idea where their stunning technological breakthrough may lead.”

Guterres urged the Security Council “to approach this technology with a sense of urgency, a global lens and a learner’s mindset, because what we have seen is just the beginning.”

AI for good and evil

The secretary-general’s remarks set the stage for a series of comments and observations by session participants on how artificial intelligence can benefit society in health, education and human rights, while recognizing that, gone unchecked, AI also has the potential to be used for nefarious purposes.

To that point, there was widespread acknowledgment that AI in every iteration of its development needs to be kept in check with specific guidelines, rules and regulations to protect privacy and ensure security without hindering innovation.

“We cannot leave the development of artificial intelligence solely to private sector actors,” said Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, a leading AI company. “The governments of the world must come together, develop state capacity, and make the development of powerful AI systems a shared endeavor across all parts of society, rather than one dictated solely by a small number of firms competing with one another in the marketplace.”

AI as human labor

Yi Zeng, a professor at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, shared a similar sentiment.

“AI should never pretend to be human,” he said. “We should use generative AI to assist but never trust them to replace human decision-making.”

The U.K. holds the council’s rotating presidency this month and British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, who chaired the session, called for international cooperation to manage the global implications of artificial intelligence. He said that “global cooperation will be vital to ensure AI technologies and the rules governing their use are developed responsibly in a way that benefits society.”

Cleverly noted how far the world has come “since the early development of artificial intelligence by pioneers like Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey.”

“This technology has advanced with ever greater speed, yet the biggest AI-induced transformations are still to come,” he said.

Making AI inclusive

“AI development is now outpacing at breakneck speed, and governments are unable to keep up,” said Omran Sharaf, assistant minister of foreign affairs and international cooperation for advanced science and technology, in the United Arab Emirates.

“It is time to be optimistic realists when it comes to AI” and to “harness the opportunities it offers,” he said.

Among the proposals he suggested was addressing real-world biases that AI could double down on.

“Decades of progress on the fight against discrimination, especially gender discrimination towards women and girls, as well as against persons with disabilities, will be undermined if we do not ensure an AI that is inclusive,” Sharaf said.

AI as double-edged sword

Zhang Jun, China’s permanent representative to the U.N., lauded the empowering role of AI in scientific research, health care and autonomous driving.

But he also acknowledged how it is raising concerns in areas such as data privacy, spreading false information, exacerbating social inequality, and its potential misuse or abuse by terrorists or extremist forces, “which will pose a significant threat to international peace and security.”

“Whether AI is used for good or evil depends on how mankind utilizes it, regulates it and how we balance scientific development with security,” he said.

U.S. envoy Jeffrey DeLaurentis said artificial intelligence offers great promise in addressing global challenges such as food security, education and medicine. He added, however, that AI also has the potential “to compound threats and intensify conflicts, including by spreading mis- and disinformation, amplifying bias and inequality, enhancing malicious cyber operations, and exacerbating human rights abuses.”

“We, therefore, welcome this discussion to understand how the council can find the right balance between maximizing AI’s benefits while mitigating its risks,” he said.

Britain’s Cleverly noted that since no country will be untouched by AI, “we must involve and engage the widest coalition of international actors from all sectors.” 

VOA’s Margaret Besheer contributed to this story.
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The U.S. has suspended funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese research laboratory at the center of the debate over the origins of the coronavirus that has killed nearly 7 million people worldwide. 

The lab has not received any U.S. funding since 2020, but for months the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has been reviewing its operations, concluding that the institute “is not compliant with federal regulations and is not presently responsible.” 

The funding cutoff was prompted by the lab’s “failure to provide documentation on [its] research requested by [the National Institutes of Health] related to concerns that [the lab] violated NIH’s biosafety protocols.” 

The virus was first identified in Wuhan. One theory holds that COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab in late 2019, triggering the pandemic. Some scientists believe the virus was passed from animals to people, possibly from a wholesale seafood market.  

The U.S. intelligence community has yet to reach a conclusion about the origins of the virus. 

Researchers at the institute have repeatedly denied that their work was related to the coronavirus outbreak, but China has blocked international scientists from a wide examination of the facility and its operations.
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Italy put 23 cities on red alert as it reckoned with another day of scorching temperatures Wednesday, with no sign of relief from the wave of extreme heat, wildfires and flooding that has wreaked havoc from the United States to China.

The heat wave has hit southern Europe during the peak summer tourist season, breaking records – including in Rome – and bringing warnings about an increased risk of deaths.

Wildfires burned for a third day west of the Greek capital, Athens, and firefighters raced to keep flames away from coastal refineries.

Fanned by erratic winds, the fires have gutted dozens of homes, forced hundreds of people to flee and blanketed the area in thick smoke. Temperatures could climb to 109 Fahrenheit on Thursday, forecasters said.

Extreme weather was also disrupting life for millions of Americans. A dangerous heat wave was holding an area stretching from Southern California to the Deep South in its grip, bringing the city of Phoenix its 20th straight day with temperatures of 110 degrees Fahrenheit or higher.

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Calvin lashed Hawaii, raising the potential for flash flooding and dangerous surf on the Big Island.

In Texas, at least nine inmates in prisons without air conditioning have suffered fatal heart attacks during the extreme heat this summer, the Texas Tribune newspaper reported.

Another 14 have died of unknown causes during periods of extreme heat.

A Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesperson said preliminary findings of the deaths indicate that heat was not a factor in the fatalities. Nearly 70 of the 100 prisons in Texas are not fully air-conditioned.

Temperatures soar in China, Italy

In China, which was hosting U.S. climate envoy John Kerry for talks, tourists defied the heat to visit a giant thermometer showing surface temperatures of 80 Celsius (176 Fahrenheit).

In Beijing, which set a record as temperatures remained above 95 Fahrenheit for the 28th consecutive day, Kerry expressed hope that cooperation to combat global warming could redefine troubled ties between the two superpowers, both among the top polluters.

Temperatures remained high across much of Italy on Wednesday, where the health ministry said it would activate an information hotline and teams of mobile health workers visited the elderly in Rome.

“These people are afraid they won’t make it, they are afraid they can’t go out,” said Claudio Consoli, a doctor and director of a health unit.

Carmaker Stellantis said it was monitoring the situation at its Pomigliano plant near Naples on Wednesday, after temporarily halting work on one production line the day before when temperatures peaked.

Workers at battery-maker Magneti Marelli threatened an eight-hour strike at their central Italian plant in Sulmona. A joint statement by the unions said that “asphyxiating heat is putting at risk the lives of workers.”

While the heat wave appears to be subsiding in Spain, residents in Greece were left surveying the wreckage of their homes after the wildfires.

Scientists have long warned that climate change, caused by greenhouse gas emissions mainly from burning fossil fuels, will make heat waves more frequent, severe and deadly and have called on governments to drastically reduce emissions.

In Germany, the heat wave sparked a discussion on whether workplaces should introduce siestas for workers.

Heat and floods in Asia

In South Korea, heavy rain has pummeled central and southern regions since last week. Fourteen deaths occurred in an underpass in the city of Cheongju, where more than a dozen vehicles were submerged on Saturday when a river levee collapsed. In the southeastern province of North Gyeongsang, 22 people died, many from landslides and swirling torrents.

In northern India, flash floods, landslides and accidents related to heavy rainfall have killed more than 100 people since the onset of the monsoon season on June 1, where rainfall is 41% above average.

The Yamuna River reached the compound walls of the Taj Mahal in Agra for the first time in 45 years, submerging several other historical monuments, and flooded parts of the Indian capital.

The Brahmaputra River, which runs through India’s Assam state, burst its banks this month, engulfing almost half of the Kaziranga National Park – home to the rare one-horned rhino – in waist-deep water.

A wall collapse from monsoon rains killed at least 11 construction workers in neighboring Pakistan.

Iraq’s southern Basra governorate, with a population of around 4 million, said government work would be suspended on Thursday as temperatures hit 122 Fahrenheit. In Iraq’s northern city of Mosul, farmers said crops were failing because of heat and drought.

The unprecedented temperatures have added new urgency for nations around the globe to tackle climate change. With the world’s two biggest economies at odds over issues ranging from trade to Taiwan, Kerry told Chinese Vice President Han Zheng on Wednesday that climate change must be handled separately from broader diplomatic issues.

“It is a universal threat to everybody on the planet and requires the largest nations in the world, the largest economies in the world, the largest emitters in the world, to come together in order to do work not just for ourselves, but for all mankind,” Kerry told Han.
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People who have a particular genetic variant are twice as likely to never feel sick when they contract COVID-19, researchers said Wednesday, offering the first potential explanation for the lucky group dubbed the “super dodgers.”

Those who have two copies of the variant are eight times more likely to never get any symptoms from COVID-19, according to the study in the journal Nature.

Previous research has suggested that at least 20% of the millions of infections during the pandemic were asymptomatic. To find out what could be behind these cases, researchers took advantage of a database of volunteer bone marrow donors in the United States.

The database included each person’s type of human leukocyte antigen (HLA), which are molecules on the surface of most cells in the body. The immune system uses HLA to see which cells belong in the body, and they are thought to play a key role in the response to viral infections.

Subjects self-reported symptoms

The researchers had nearly 30,000 people on the bone marrow registry self-report their COVID tests and symptoms on a mobile phone app.

More than 1,400 unvaccinated people tested positive for COVID between February 2020 and late April 2021, the study said. Out of that group, 136 saw no symptoms two weeks before and after testing positive. 

One in five of that group carried at least one copy of an HLA variant called HLA-B*15:01.

Those fortunate enough to have two copies of the gene, one from their mother and one from their father, were more than eight times more likely to be asymptomatic from COVID-91 than other people, the study said.

To find out why this was the case, the team carried out separate research looking at T cells, which protect the body from infections, in people who carried the variant. The researchers specifically looked at how T cells remembered viruses they had previously encountered.

This meant they were “armed and ready for attack when they encounter the same pathogen again,” said Jill Hollenbach of the University of California, San Francisco, who was the study’s lead researcher.

When people with the HLA variant were exposed to the coronavirus, their T cells were particularly primed for battle because they remembered similar cold viruses they had previously fended off.

Children often spared the worst

This theory — that recent exposure to colds and other coronaviruses could lead to fewer COVID symptoms — has previously been proposed to explain why children have often been spared the worst of COVID.

“Anyone that has ever been a parent knows that kids are snotty-nosed for five or six years, so I think that’s a really reasonable thing to speculate might be happening,” Hollenbach said.

She said the HLA variant was likely just one piece of the genetic puzzle behind asymptomatic COVID.

The researchers hope that studying the immune response to COVID could lead to new treatments or vaccines in the future. Hollenbach said one interesting idea was a vaccine that prevents COVID symptoms, as opposed to infection, which could potentially last longer than the currently available vaccines.

The researchers warned that most of the study’s participants were white, which could limit the findings for other groups, and that it covered an earlier period of the pandemic and did not include re-infections.
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Tayba Hatimy studied and practiced dentistry for seven years before she realized her real passion was caring for the environment. Since then, she has founded a garbage collection app that helps people in Mombasa, Kenya reduce garbage along the coast. Saida Swaleh has the story. (Camera: Moses Baya )
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Childhood immunization has rebounded following a significant decline during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, but at an uneven rate with too many children in low-income countries still missing out on the life-saving products, according to a joint World Health Organization-UNICEF report.

The agencies say that four million more children were immunized against killer diseases in 2022 compared to the previous year.

“Last year, we rang alarm bells at the historic backsliding that we saw across countries, regions, and vaccines,” said Kate O’Brien, director, immunization, vaccines, and biologicals, WHO.

“From 2022’s data, from a global perspective, we are recovering,” she said. “But that recovery is uneven, with too many countries not yet seeing improvement.”

The report says that just eight large countries—India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines, Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan, and Tanzania—account for 3.8 million of the four million additional children reached in 2022.

Of the 73 countries that recorded substantial declines of more than five percent during the pandemic, the report says “24 are on route to recovery and, most concerningly, 34 have stagnated or continued declining.”

O’Brien said a main measure of immunization program performance is how many zero-dose children exist.

“These are children who do not receive a first dose of the vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. It means these are children who do not receive any vaccine through the routine immunization program.”

The good news, she said, is that global coverage of the first dose of DTP vaccine now stands at 89 percent—very close to the pre-pandemic coverage of 90 percent.

However, she noted that the data is a lot more nuanced when looked at by region and income.

“All regions, except for the Africa region, have made progress in recovery for DTP. The region’s coverage is now six percent lower than 2019 levels and this is the largest gap for any region,” she said.

The report finds some backsliding in measles vaccine coverage as well, noting that only 83 percent of children globally were vaccinated against that killer disease in 2022, below pre-pandemic levels of 86 percent.

“Fifty-nine countries reported a total of 80 measles outbreaks in 2022,” said Ephrem Tekle Lemango, UNICEF associate director of immunization.

“Since coverage levels declined, we have witnessed outbreaks of diseases such as measles, yellow fever and diphtheria increasing, and our efforts to eradicate polio have been set back,” he said.

“If we do not catch-up vaccinations of older children that were missed since 2019, quickly and urgently,” he warned, “we will inevitably witness more outbreaks and be responsible for more child deaths.”

The WHO’s Kate O’Brien expressed the urgency of vaccinating children against measles in low-income countries, noting that someone who is not immune to the disease could infect between 12 and 20 other people.

“The way children become immune is best done by vaccination, not by actually getting infected and risking severe disease or death or other consequences from measles,” she said.

Ephrem Lemango said reaching children on the African continent, which is home to 12 percent of the world’s population, is particularly challenging as “It is home to 54 percent of the un- or under-vaccinated children,” a significant proportion of whom remain unreached.

“This is because they are facing other challenges, such as conflict and crises,” he said, “but also because, over many years, they have not had the resources to build resilient health systems.”

O’Brien said the overarching, dominant reason why children do not get vaccinated is lack of access. She said families in remote, rural areas in particular have difficulty reaching a clinic where vaccines are administered.

However, she added that “We are very concerned about vaccine confidence and the awareness of families around the benefit of vaccines.

“And clearly, the information and misinformation and disinformation that is growing in size and growing in scope is having some impact in some communities at specific times on the confidence that people have in vaccines.”
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Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming part of our social media world on our cellphones and computers. Text, images, audio and video are becoming easier for anyone to create using new generative AI tools.

As AI-generated materials become more pervasive, it’s getting harder to tell the difference between what is real and what has been manipulated.

“It’s one of the challenges over the next decade,” said Kristian Hammond, a professor of computer science who focuses on artificial intelligence at Northwestern University.

AI-generated content is making its way into movies, TV shows and social media on Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat and other platforms.

AI has been used to change images of former President Donald Trump and Pope Francis. The winner of a prestigious international photo competition this year used AI to create a fake photo.

Victor Lee, who specializes in AI as an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, said, “people need to exercise caution when looking at AI-generated materials.”

Whether it’s text, video, an image or audio, with generative AI we are seeing things that look like actual news or an image of a particular person but it’s not true, Lee said.

AI is also being used to create songs that sound like popular musical artists and replicating images of actors.

Recently, an anonymous person on TikTok used artificial intelligence to create a song with a beat, lyrics and voices that fooled many people into believing it was a recording by pop stars Drake and The Weeknd.

Among the demands of television and film actors and writers currently on strike in the U.S. are protections against the use of AI, which has advanced to replicate faces, bodies and voices on movies and TV.

“I think the Avatar movies have been so successful because people were able to identify with the animation of the simulated characters,” said Bernie Luskin, director of the Luskin community college leadership initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Luskin, who does research on media psychology, thinks that as the use of AI becomes a worldwide phenomenon, it will affect people psychologically and influence their behavior.

“It’s definitely going to have a dramatic impact on social media,” he said. “As AI becomes more common, it will become increasingly deceptive, and abusers will abuse it.”

On a positive note, Hammond said AI will promote additional artistic elements.

“We’re going to have a new view of what it means to be creative,” he said, “and there will be a different kind of appreciation because the AI systems are generating things in partnership with a human.”

A major concern, however, is that people are already being duped by AI, and as the technology becomes even more sophisticated, it will be even more difficult to discern its imprint.

Krishnan Vasudevan, assistant professor in visual communication at the University of Maryland, worries that people may become immune to AI-generated materials and won’t care if they are real or not.

“They’ll be wanting visuals that reinforce their viewpoints, and they’ll use the tool as a way to discredit or make fun of political opponents,” he said.

Experts say norms, regulations and guardrails must be considered to keep AI in line.

“Does AI receive credit as a co-author?” Lee asked.

“I think there will be legal battles about using somebody’s voice or likeness,” Vasudevan said.

“We have to start looking hard at exactly what is going out there,” said Hammond. “For example, there should be regulations that say your image should not be associated with anything pornographic.”

Lee said artificial intelligence will create big changes the public will get used to, much like the Internet and social media have done.

“The Internet is not inherently a good or bad thing, but it changed society,” he said. “AI is also not good or bad, and it is going to do something similar.”
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Chinese livestreamers have set their sights on TikTok shoppers in the U.S. and Europe, hawking everything from bags and apparel to crystals with their eyes on a potentially lucrative market, despite uncertainties over the platform’s future in the U.S. and elsewhere.

In China, where livestreaming ecommerce is forecast to reach 4.9 trillion yuan ($676 billion) by the year’s end, popular hosts like “Lipstick King” Austin Li rack up tens of millions of dollars in sales during a single livestream. Many brands, including L’Oreal, Nike and Louis Vuitton, have begun using livestreaming to reach more shoppers.

But the highly competitive livestreaming market in China has led some hosts to look to Western markets to carve out niches for themselves.

Oreo Deng, a former English tutor, sells jewelry to U.S. customers by livestreaming on TikTok, delivering her sales pitches in English for about four to six hours a day.

“I wanted to try livestreaming on TikTok because it aligned with my experiences as an English tutor and my past jobs working in cross-border e-commerce,” Deng said.

Since 2019, western e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Facebook have experimented with livestreaming e-commerce after seeing the success of Chinese platforms like Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao, and Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese counterpart in China.

TikTok started testing its live shopping feature last year. Registered merchants from the U.S., Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore, among other countries, can now sell via livestreams online.

But livestreaming e-commerce has yet to take off in the U.S. The livestreaming e-commerce market in the U.S. — the world’s biggest consumer market — is expected to grow to $68 billion by 2026, according to research and advisory firm Coresight Research.

The relatively lukewarm reception led Facebook to shut down its live shopping feature last year. As for TikTok, the platform has the added risk of potentially facing U.S. restrictions due to tensions between Beijing and Washington.

TikTok, whose parent company is Chinese technology firm ByteDance, has been criticized for its Chinese ties and accused of being a national security risk due to the data it collects.

TikTok did not provide comment for this story.

Despite the scrutiny faced by TikTok, many Chinese hosts view the U.S. as a vast ocean of opportunity, an emerging market that has yet to be saturated with livestreaming hosts.

“There’s more opportunity for growth to target America because the competition is so fierce in China,” said Shaun Rein, founder and managing director of China Market Research Group in Shanghai. “Livestreaming in the U.S. is at a beginning starting point. There’s more opportunity to grab market share.”

Rein also said that Chinese merchants can often price items higher in the U.S., where customers are accustomed to paying higher prices compared to in China, where product margins are often razor-thin.

“The format is going to work, because it’s been proven,” said Jacob Cooke, CEO of e-commerce consultancy WPIC.

Smaller companies, including those in China that are attempting to sell on TikTok, might lack enough data on what customers want in markets like the U.S, he said. “Once they do get that figured out, they’ll start to have very good success,” Cooke said.

For some U.S. shoppers, the livestream format is a fascinating form of entertainment.

Freisa Weaver, a 36-year-old who lives in Florida, stumbled on a TikTok livestream selling crystals 10 months ago. It employed a popular tactic called a “lucky scoop” where buyers pay a set price to receive several random items scooped from a large container of crystals. TikTok earlier this year banned this practice from livestreams to comply with gambling laws, although some sellers still offer grab bags of goodies which appear to be scooped off-camera.

“I came across it scrolling through TikTok and at first I was entertained by the lucky scoops,” Weaver said, describing livestreaming shopping as an addictive hobby. “Now I’m a regular buyer in some of the live feeds on TikTok.”

“I personally enjoy the interactions with the host and the possibility of finding something special and unique just for me,” she said

Her favorite channel is Meow Crystals, an account operated by Chinese streaming hosts that often does flash sales selling crystals for as little as $2, and grab bags of crystals from $10. TikTok has yet to roll out its in-built shopping feature on a wide scale, so many streamers, including those from Meow Crystals, often redirect viewers to place orders on an external website.

“The host is willing to go to the warehouse for you and get special items, or they remember what you like and offer it to you as soon as you are online,” Weaver said.

Chinese livestreaming hosts try various tactics to stand out and build a loyal customer base. For some, it’s personalized customer service, while others use quirky catchphrases and concoct flamboyant online personalities to keep their customers entertained.

“Every host is always experimenting and develops their own tactics,” Deng, the livestream host said, declining to share the secrets of her own approach.

Boot camps to teach Chinese livestreamers how to increase their sales have sprung up, including a popular one hosted by Yan Guanghua, one of TikTok earliest livestreamers in China.

Like Deng, Yan is a former English tutor who turned to TikTok livestreaming after a government crackdown on the private education industry.

Yan started out hawking yoga clothes, electronics and apparel online. Finding she had a knack for selling to customers via livestreaming, she at times has racked up sales of 5,000 pounds ($6,510) per stream selling to customers in Britain.

Now she charges about $1,000 for two-day boot camps she holds two or three times a month, teaching people how to sell more on livestreams.

Yan says she has trained more than 600 people, mostly from China but also from the U.S. and Africa.

Like many other TikTok livestreaming hosts, she hopes the overseas livestreaming e-commerce market will take off like it has in China.

“It’s hard to say what the future of this industry is. It’s difficult to predict,” Yan said. “But what we know is that TikTok is the most popular platform right now and there is still opportunity here.”
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Climate change is a “universal threat” that should be handled separately from broader diplomatic issues, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry told Chinese Vice-President Han Zheng on Wednesday after two days of what he called constructive but complex talks. 

Acknowledging the diplomatic difficulties between the two sides in recent years, Kerry said climate should be treated as a “free-standing” challenge that requires the collective efforts of the world’s largest economies to resolve.  

“We have the ability to … make a difference with respect to climate,” he said at a meeting at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, China’s sprawling parliament building. 

Kerry arrived in Beijing on Sunday as heat waves scorched parts of Europe, Asia and the United States, underscoring the need for governments to take drastic action to reduce carbon emissions, which contribute to global warming and extreme weather events. 

He has held meetings with China’s top diplomat Wang Yi and Premier Li Qiang as well as veteran climate envoy Xie Zhenhua in a bid to rebuild trust between the two sides ahead of COP28 climate talks in Dubai at the end of the year.  

“If we can come together over these next months leading up to COP28, which will be the most important since Paris, we will have an opportunity to be able to make a profound difference on this issue,” he told Han.  

Han said the two countries had maintained close communication and dialog on climate since Kerry’s appointment as envoy, adding that a joint statement issued by the two sides has sent a “positive signal” to the world.  

Kerry told reporters earlier that his talks with Chinese officials this week have been constructive but complicated, with the two sides still dealing with political “externalities,” including Taiwan. 

“We’re just reconnecting,” he said. “We’re trying to re-establish the process we have worked on for years.” 

“We’re trying to carve out a very clear path to the COP to be able to cooperate and work as we have wanted to with all the externalities,” Kerry said.  

Climate diplomacy between the world’s top two emitters was suspended in August last year following the visit of U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, a democratically governed island that China claims. 

“The mood is very, very positive,” Kerry said ahead of Wednesday’s meetings. “We had a terrific dinner last night. We had a lot of back and forth. It’s really constructive.” 

“We’re focused on the substance of what we can really work on and what we can make happen.”  
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Does generative artificial intelligence pose a risk to humanity that could lead to our extinction?

That was among the questions put to experts by the head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission at a workshop hosted with the National Science Foundation.

FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said she is more hopeful about artificial intelligence than pessimistic. “That might sound contrarian,” she said, given that so much of the news about AI is “dark,” raising questions such as, “How do we rein in this technology? What does it mean for the future of work when we have intelligent machines? What will it mean for democracy and elections?”

The discussion included participants from a range of industries including network operators and vendors, leading academics, federal agencies, and public interest representatives.  

“We are entering the AI revolution,” said National Science Foundation senior adviser John Chapin, who described this as a “once-in-a-generation change in technology capabilities” which “require rethinking the fundamental assumptions that underline our communications.” 

“It is vital that we bring expert understanding of the science of technology together with expert understanding of the user and regulatory issues.” 

Investing in AI 

FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington pointed out that while technology may sometimes give the appearance of arriving suddenly, in many cases it’s a product of a steady but unnoticed evolution decades in the making. He gave the example of ChatGPT as AI that landed seemingly overnight, with dramatic impact. 

“Where the United States has succeeded in technological development, it has done so through a mindful attempt to cultivate and potentiate innovation.”

Lisa Guess, senior vice president of Solutions Engineering at the firm Ericsson/Cradlepoint, expressed concern that her company’s employees could “cut and paste” code into the ChatGPT window to try to perfect it, thereby exposing the company’s intellectual property. ”There are many things that we all have to think through as we do this.” 

Other panelists agreed. “With the opportunity to use data comes the opportunity that the data can be corrupted,” said Ness Shroff, a professor at The Ohio State University who is also an expert on AI. He called for “appropriate guardrails” to prevent that corruption.

FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said AI “has the potential to impact if not transform nearly every aspect of American life.” Because of that potential, everyone, especially in government, shoulders a responsibility to better understand AI’s risks and opportunities. “That is just good governance in this era of rapid technological change.”  

“Fundamental issues of equity are not a side salad here,” he said. “They have to be fundamental as we consider technological advancement. AI has raised the stakes of defending our networks” and ultimately “network security means national security.” 

Digital equity, robocalls 

Alisa Valentin, senior director of technology and telecommunications policy at the civil rights organization the National Urban League, voiced her concerns about the illegal and predatory nature of robocalls. “Even if we feel like we won’t fall victim to robocalls, we are concerned about our family members or friends who may not be as tech savvy,” knowing how robocalls “can turn people’s lives upside down.”

Valentin also emphasized the urgent need to close the digital divide “to make sure that every community can benefit from the digital economy not only as consumers but also as workers and business owners.” 

“Access to communication services is a civil right,” she said. “Equity has to be at the center of everything we do when having conversations about AI.” 

Global competition

FCC Commissioner Simington said global competitors are “really good, and we should assume that they are taking us seriously, so we should protect what is ours.” But regulations to protect the expropriation of American innovation should not go overboard.

“Let’s make sure we don’t give away the store, but let’s not do it by keeping the shelves empty.” 
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