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Prosecutors across 47 states, Washington, D.C., and U.S. territories have announced a groundbreaking legal settlement with technology giant Meta over accusations that the social media company deliberately designed addictive products they knew to be harmful to children. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, is set to pay at least $12 billion and up to $17.1 billion in financial penalties, in addition to implementing design changes for underage users. "This is the least they can do to prevent harms that have metastasized and have already caused suicides … [but] we cannot be relying on fines, or certainly even on litigation, after harms have already transpired. What we need are rules of the road. And we need rules that go to the root cause of the business model," says Amba Kak, the co-executive director of AI Now Institute, who joins us for a wide-ranging discussion on tech policy and regulation. Kak, who advises various governments on AI regulatory guidelines, adds, "The era of looking to tech CEOs or tech luminaries to give us answers for what are fundamentally social and political questions, I think, is gone."
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Senator Darline Graham has spoken far more about her desire to support President Trump's agenda than she has talked about her brother's political goals — or her own.
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Earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly attacked the former labor secretary under President Clinton, Robert Reich. Reich wrote in a post online that "Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said this week the K-shaped economy — the widening economic gap between the rich and the poor — is 'dead.' Hogwash. Not only is the K-shaped economy very much alive, even CEOs are admitting it's a problem." The treasury secretary went on to suggest the University of California, Berkeley should fire Reich.
"There's something in this administration," says Reich. "It's almost a kind of testosterone poisoning in which everybody has to be really nasty, put down everybody else."
Reich goes on to discuss economic inequality, pointing out that while inflation is on the rise, "most Americans are finding that their wages are stagnant … which means that most Americans are getting poorer."
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