Perspective.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/could-your-job-be-at-risk-due-to-ai-do-this-before-its-too-late/

Could your job be at risk due to AI? Do this before it's too late

A couple of weeks ago, The World Economic Forum dropped its predictions for the future of jobs and the seismic shift in the workforce over the next five years (2030).

Here's a link: The Future of Jobs Report 2025

Let me tell you, this thing is really well put together.

Notice that AI did not identify this test.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/inventors-using-ai-can-secure-ip-protection-via-pannu-factor-test

Inventors Using AI Can Secure IP Protection Via Pannu Factor Test

… Aspiring inventors can look to the Pannu factors for answers. Stemming from 1998’s Pannu v. Iolab Corp, these requirements are used to determine whether an individual made significant contributions to an invention as part of a human team, but they apply when using AI as a creative partner too.

Under Pannu, each named inventor for a patent must satisfy all three of these provisions:

• Contribute in some significant manner to the conception or reduction to practice of the invention

• Make a contribution to the claimed invention that is not insignificant in quality, when that contribution is measured against the dimension of the full invention

• Do more than merely explain well-known concepts and/or the current state of the art to the real inventors

Because law isn’t just that legal stuff?

https://abovethelaw.com/2025/01/law-school-now-requires-students-to-get-artificial-intelligence-certification/

Law School Now Requires Students To Get Artificial Intelligence Certification

Likely the first of many.

Generative AI continues to dominate the legal tech hype cycle. Despite high-profile embarrassments for lawyers trying to use the algorithmic hallucination machine to disastrous end, trusted industry providers remain confident that proper safeguards and techniques can build a time-saving AI assistant for lawyers.

And idiots are saying the same thing.

… Case Western Reserve University School of Law understands both the promise and limitations of generative AI and has launched a new requirement for 1Ls to achieve certification in AI.

Case Western Reserve University School of Law will become the first in the nation to require all first-year law students to earn a certification in legal artificial intelligence (AI). Launching in February of this year, the “Introduction to AI and the Law” program—developed in partnership with Wickard.ai—will immerse students in the fundamentals of AI and its impact on the legal world.

Reality isn’t what it seems, it’s what the President says it is.

https://www.the-sun.com/news/13360831/donald-trump-tiktok-china-spy-threat/

Trump downplays fears China using TikTok to spy on Americans as he says app is for ‘crazy videos’ after halting ban

DONALD Trump has downplayed fears that China is using TikTok to spy on Americans – just days after signing an executive order that delayed a ban on the social media app.

The president sat down with Fox News titan Sean Hannity and said the app is for children who watch crazy videos.

I wonder what the prompt was… (Does no one proof read?)

https://www.bespacific.com/trump-admin-accused-of-using-ai-to-draft-executive-orders/

Trump Admin Accused of Using AI to Draft Executive Orders

Futurism: “Mere hours after being sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday, returning President Donald Trump got to work signing dozens — and counting — of executive orders, which range from commands for the US to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization to ordering an end to birthright citizenship and renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” But while the executive actions range in scope, legal experts have called attention to some curious common threads: bizarre typos, formatting errors and oddities, and stilted language — familiar artifacts that have led to speculation that those who penned them might have turned to AI for help. “Lots of reporting suggested that, this time around, Trump and his lawyers would avoid the sloppy legal work that plagued his first administration so they’d fare better in the courts,” Slate journalist and legal expert Mark Joseph Stern remarked last night in a Bluesky post. “I see no evidence of that in this round of executive orders.” “This is poor, slipshod work,” he added, before alleging that the actions were “obviously assisted by AI.” In another post, Stern pointed to a deeply questionable section of an executive action titled “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential,” which details how the US will take advantage of the state’s “untapped supply of natural resources,” in part by drilling for fossil fuels in regions of previously-protected natural land. In that section, the order includes a numbered list of several distinct Public Land Orders to be reinstated. Each land order, however, is listed next to the number one — an apparent slip-up, we should point out, that we’ve noticed on seemingly AI-generated content in the past…”

If you use AI in California or touch residents anywhere?

https://pogowasright.org/california-ag-issues-legal-advisories-on-the-application-of-california-law-to-the-use-of-ai/

California AG Issues Legal Advisories on the Application of California Law to the Use of AI

Hunton Andrews Kurth writes:

On January 13, 2025, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued two legal advisories on the use of AI, including in the healthcare context. The first legal advisory (“AI Advisory”) advises consumers and entities about their rights and obligations under the state’s consumer protection, civil rights, competition, and data privacy laws with respect to the use of AI, while the second (“Healthcare AI Advisory”) provides guidance specific to healthcare entities about their obligations under California law regarding the use of AI.

The AI Advisory notes that businesses have existing obligations with respect to their use of AI under existing California law, including the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, the California Invasion of Privacy Act, the Student Online Personal information Protection Act and the Confidentiality of Medical information Act.

The AI Advisory also notes the applicability of recently passed AI laws (with effective dates in 2025 and 2026) to businesses’ use of AI, including laws providing:

• disclosure requirements for businesses (e.g., regarding training data used in AI models, AI-generated telemarketing, detection tools for content created by generative AI);

• contractual and consent requirements relating to the unauthorized use of likeness in the entertainment industry and other contexts;

• disclosure and content removal requirements relating to the use of AI in election and campaign materials;

• prohibition of and reporting requirements related to exploitative uses of AI (i.e., child pornography, nonconsensual pornography using deepfake technology, sexually explicit digital identity theft); and

• supervision requirements for use of AI tools in healthcare settings.

Read more at Privacy & Information Security Law Blog.

Basic economics.

https://fee.org/articles/why-we-shouldnt-be-concerned-about-ai-replacing-jobs/

Why We Shouldn’t Be Concerned about AI Replacing Jobs

Technological unemployment is how we become better off.

Presidential marketing 101? (Pure speculations, I’m sure.)

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/your-memecoin-is-your-slush-fund

Your memecoin is your slush fund

Crypto is, in fact, about sending people money.

… Just before his inauguration, Donald Trump and his wife Melania launched a pair of cryptocurrencies, called TRUMP and MELANIA. The coins have both declined in value from their initial peaks, but their market capitalizations, as of this writing, are still around $7 billion and $800 million, respectively:

… But on the other hand, it is possible that TRUMP and MELANIA do have fundamental value. One simple way this could be true is if President Trump directs the federal government to buy his own memecoins with taxpayer money. He has already discussed the idea of creating a “strategic Bitcoin reserve” (i.e., using taxpayer money to buy Bitcoin). What if his reserve also bought a little bit of TRUMP and MELANIA? That would of course be incredibly corrupt, and in any well-functioning society it would be illegal. But in the age of Trump, who knows what will fly?

In fact, though, there’s another, much more plausible reason why TRUMP and MELANIA could actually have real, fundamental value. It’s because these coins allow people to give Donald Trump money without actually transferring him funds.

Suppose you wanted to buy a favor from Donald Trump, and he wanted to let you buy a favor from him. How could you do it? You can’t just pay him a giant bribe — that’s illegal. Maybe you could pledge him a bunch of cash for his presidential campaign. But there are campaign finance laws that will get in your way, and even if you succeed, he can only use the money for his campaign, not to buy yachts or whatever else he might like to use the money for.

Instead, what you can do is to buy a bunch of TRUMP or MELANIA. When you buy one of those memecoins, you increase the demand for the memecoin. Its price then goes up. T his makes Donald Trump richer, without any money actually having to change hands.

An interesting conflict.

https://www.ft.com/content/bdc2250f-fbd9-4c4a-98cf-42e389e5b6c0

Legal AI is reaching deep into the workplace

Technology allows companies to automate drafting of many contracts rather than relying on lawyers

Few industries appear to have more potential for disruption by artificial intelligence than the law. Like games such as Go, which DeepMind took on to demonstrate the power of neural networks, legal systems have sets of rules and precedents. Give an AI model enough data and it can pass its bar examination.

… Slaughter and May was among Luminance’s early investors, along with the late Mike Lynch’s Invoke Capital, and it initially focused on reforming how corporate law firms operate. They provide expensive due diligence for transactions such as mergers and acquisitions that involve junior lawyers sifting through thousands of documents. That sounds like a plum target for disruption.

But things have not quite worked out like that, so far. Much of the recent expansion in legal AI has come not from integrating the technology into law firms but automating the drafting of contracts by companies: Genie AI’s users include many smaller manufacturing and building companies. More than changing the legal industry, it is allowing corporations to do more legal work themselves.

For those keeping score…

https://www.wbaltv.com/article/track-the-executive-orders-president-donald-trump-signed-on-day-1/63458999

Track the executive orders President Donald Trump signed on Day 1

… Here are all the executive orders Trump has signed so far.

Useful backgrounders?

https://www.weforum.org/publications/industries-in-the-intelligent-age-white-paper-series/

Industries in the Intelligent Age White Paper Series

Explore the AI Governance Alliance’s white paper series – Industries in the Intelligent Age. As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, each paper in this series captures a unique perspective on AI – including a detailed snapshot of the landscape at the time of writing. Recognizing that ongoing shifts and advancements are already in motion, the aim is to continuously deepen and update the understanding of AI’s implications and applications through collaboration with the community of World Economic Forum partners and stakeholders engaged in AI strategy and implementation across organizations.

https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_AI_in_Action_Beyond_Experimentation_to_Transform_Industry_2025.pdf

I find this amusing…

https://www.bespacific.com/wikenigma-an-encyclopedia-of-unknowns/

Wikenigma – an Encyclopedia of Unknowns

Wikenigma is a unique wiki-based resource specifically dedicated to documenting fundamental gaps in human knowledge. Listing scientific and academic questions to which no-one, anywhere, has yet been able to provide a definitive answer. [ 1139 so far ] That’s to say, a compendium of so-called ‘Known Unknowns’.  All articles are open for registered users to contribute and edit.

Illustrating another weakness of AI…

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/19/ai-isnt-very-good-at-history-new-paper-finds/

AI isn’t very good at history, new paper finds

… The results, which were presented last month at the high-profile AI conference NeurIPS, were disappointing, according to researchers affiliated with the Complexity Science Hub (CSH), a research institute based in Austria. The best-performing LLM was GPT-4 Turbo, but it only achieved about 46% accuracy — not much higher than random guessing. 

… “If you get told A and B 100 times, and C 1 time, and then get asked a question about C, you might just remember A and B and try to extrapolate from that,” del Rio-Chanona said.

The researchers also identified other trends, including that OpenAI and Llama models performed worse for certain regions like sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting potential biases in their training data.

(Related) I ask if this would work with an AI President Trump?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/us/politics/cia-chatbot-technology.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qU4.ewJH.Y67Tn8psaZWH&smid=url-share

C.I.A.’s Chatbot Stands In for World Leaders

Understanding leaders around the world is one of the C.I.A.’s most important jobs. Teams of analysts comb through intelligence collected by spies and publicly available information to create profiles of leaders that can predict behaviors.

A chatbot powered by artificial intelligence now helps do that work.

Over the last two years, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed a tool that allows analysts to talk to virtual versions of foreign presidents and prime ministers, who answer back.

So where would the ‘power’ go? (Remember, AI can’t vote.)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/19/ai-could-destroy-democracy-as-we-know-it

AI could destroy democracy as we know it

… Since the second Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century, the prevailing national political superstructure of industrial capitalism in the global north, apart from the interlude of European fascism, has been various forms of parliamentary democracy. Those structures developed, in large part, because organised labour could bargain with capital for a share of the wealth that human labour creates, and built political parties to represent working people’s interests. Indeed, labour-relations systems, based on freedom of association and collective bargaining, have been pillars of functioning democracies.

However, rather than creating more productive jobs, as some envisage, the AI revolution could entail a transformative reduction in work and employment that would remove capital’s reliance on human labour to produce surplus value and profit. If that leads to the demise of workers’ organisations and to further hollowing-out of the economic base of social democratic political parties, crucial questions arise. How will capital be kept under control and held to account? What will prevent the Musks of the world from achieving complete state capture? What mechanisms will be left to ensure some semblance of redistribution of the wealth created in AI value chains? And how far can incomes fall before levels of demand become unsustainably low?

A worthwhile comparison?

https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/items/c7d937a3-db8e-440e-acb5-bebf38505684

Artificial intelligence and automated decision making under the GDPR and the POPIA

This analysis considers the concepts of AI and machine learning and examines their reliance on the processing of personal data and the challenges this poses from a data- privacy and human-rights perspective, particularly in relation to profiling. It evaluates the effectiveness of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Promotion of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA) in regulating Automated Decision Making (ADM) and considers the limitations of the right to an explanation under these provisions. The analysis proposes that the current framework of the GDPR and POPIA does not clearly address the issue of explainability and that the focus should shift to providing a data subject with a counterfactual to give practical effect to this right which would better serve data subjects

Probably false.

https://hrcak.srce.hr/en/326914

Some (Wittgensteinian) Remarks on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

I argue in favor of a distinction between human understanding and machine “understanding”. Based on Wittgenstein’s view on machines and his considerations on understanding, I aim to demonstrate that no machine with artificial intelligence can reach functional equality with human beings. In particular, this also holds for ethical praxis because it consists of an extremely blurred net of language– games, guided by ethical rules. Therefore, a machine can never have the human ability (disposition) to act ethically and cannot be a moral agent.

Understanding the arguments?

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5097441

Not The End Of Lawyers, But A Beginning The Place Of Entrepreneurship And Innovation In Legal Ethics

In questioning, if not declaring, the demise of the legal profession of the 20th century, Richard Susskind’s The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services (Oxford University Press, 2008) set the stage for a new subfield of legal ethics devoted to entrepreneurship and innovation. A scholar of law and technology, not an ethicist, Susskind nonetheless forced regulators of professional ethics to consider whether or not to address obligations related to technology-driven evolution in the delivery of legal services. In the decade-plus since the first publication of the book, numerous jurisdictions have adopted ethical rules that require lawyers to maintain competence in the risks and benefits of changes in law practice, many of which Susskind forecast. Similarly, a growing number of scholars and commentators now include the ethics of legal services delivery under the umbrella of legal ethics generally.

This book chapter situates Susskind’s book in the context of the international canon of legal ethics and validates it as a leading work. In doing so, the chapter is partially autobiographical in nature, discussing the parallel evolution of Renee Knake Jefferson’s own work creating a law laboratory devoted to technology, entrepreneurship, and innovation to prepare future lawyers for the world Susskind predicts. Susskind often criticizes lawyers for failing to recognize and provide what their clients actually want. For example, he tells the story about the sale of drills. People don’t buy drills because they want drills, he says, they do so because they want holes. But Susskind is only partially correct; people don’t want holes. They want artwork or photos hung on the nail that fills the hole, and the feeling they have when the see that art or photo hanging on the wall. Similarly, the conclusions he reaches in The End of Lawyers? are only partially correct. Viewing his book as one about legal ethics, not simply the nature of legal services, reveals critical gaps and omissions that this chapter aims to fill.

Wishing makes it so?

https://venturebeat.com/ai/anthropomorphizing-ai-dire-consequences-of-mistaking-human-like-for-human-have-already-emerged/

Anthropomorphizing AI: Dire consequences of mistaking human-like for human have already emerged

In our rush to understand and relate to AI, we have fallen into a seductive trap: Attributing human characteristics to these robust but fundamentally non-human systems. This anthropomorphizing of AI is not just a harmless quirk of human nature — it is becoming an increasingly dangerous tendency that might cloud our judgment in critical ways. Business leaders are comparing AI learning to human education to justify training practices to lawmakers crafting policies based on flawed human-AI analogies. This tendency to humanize AI might inappropriately shape crucial decisions across industries and regulatory frameworks.

Viewing AI through a human lens in business has led companies to overestimate AI capabilities or underestimate the need for human oversight, sometimes with costly consequences. The stakes are particularly high in copyright law, where anthropomorphic thinking has led to problematic comparisons between human learning and AI training.

Does this make you want to go back to school? (Me neither.)

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-digital-self/202501/can-ai-condense-two-years-of-learning-into-six-weeks

Can AI Condense Two Years of Learning Into Six Weeks?

In a modest classroom in Edo State, Nigeria, an educational revolution unfolded. Over six weeks, students accomplished what would typically take two years. This wasn’t a product of extra hours or an elite teaching corps. It was the result of generative AI—a large language model serving as a virtual tutor in an after-school program. The pilot program, supported by the World Bank and published on their website, delivered remarkable results: students made significant strides in English, digital literacy, and even foundational AI concepts. The numbers are extraordinary, but the story is even more compelling. Here, in a Nigeria classroom, we caught a glimpse of how AI might redefine learning for millions worldwide.