Three years until we’re in Orwell’s 1984 AI surveillance panopticon, warns Microsoft boss

The president of Microsoft says the dystopian all-seeing eye in George Orwell’s 1984 could be just three years away - if politicians do not get to grips with the march of government-sanctioned AI surveillance.

Brad Smith warns the science fiction of a government knowing where we are at all times, and even what we’re feeling, is becoming reality in parts of the world.

Smith says it’s “difficult to catch up” with ever-advancing AI, which was revealed is being used to scan prisoners’ emotions in China.

Facebook says the company will take tougher action against users who repeatedly share misinformation on the platform.

It comes as Facebook also says it will no longer ban posts claiming Covid-19 is man-made, as President Biden says spies would be deployed to probe the origins of the pandemic.

And speaking of which… It’s claimed many phrases associated with QAnon have largely disappeared from mainstream social media.

Researchers at the Atlantic Council’s Digitak Forensics lab say the volume of those terms seen on Google, Facebook and Twitter has nosedived.

German scientists claim to have discovered why some Covid-19 vaccines cause blood clots, in five years the world may be at its maximum working temperature, Tesla’s gigafactory fire “could have been a far-left attack”, how switching off a protein could improve the lives of heart attack survivors, and, Professor Stephen Hawking’s archive of scientific & personal papers - and that Simpsons script - are now on display.

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