MAROKO133 Breaking ai: Trump’s Top Anti-Tylenol Expert Was Paid to Hate Tylenol, Records S

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: Trump’s Top Anti-Tylenol Expert Was Paid to Hate Tylenol, R

President Donald Trump made baffling remarks during a Monday press conference, claiming that pregnant women should avoid Tylenol, the brand name of acetaminophen, arguing that it was associated with a “very increased” risk of autism.

It was a new low for the Trump administration, leading to widespread outrage and incredulity among experts.

Then things got even sketchier when the New York Times revealed that the researcher behind the studies cited during Monday’s press conference had a financial interest in warning users against the use of Tylenol.

Andrea Baccarelli, the dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, received at least $150,000 as an expert witness during several lawsuits aimed at Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol, federal court filings reviewed by the newspaper show.

It’s a glaring conflict of interest, and a worrying example of how the Trump administration is using quack science to further a pseudoscientific agenda. Worse yet, it’s using baseless evidence linked to civil litigation to justify its claims.

A federal judge dismissed the suits aimed at the Tylenol maker, which were filed by families who claimed their children developed autism or ADHD after using Tylenol during pregnancy. The judge cited a lack of reliable scientific evidence and agreed with the defendants that Baccarelli had “cherry-picked and misrepresented study results,” according to the NYT.

While plenty of research has gone into examining a possible link between autism and acetaminophen use by pregnant women, no substantive connection has been found.

Even the World Health Organization has also since pushed back against Trump’s claims, pointing out that “extensive research, including large-scale studies over the past decade, has found no consistent association,” in a statement.

The study cited by FDA commissioner Marty Makary during Monday’s press conference evaluated 46 existing studies, and found that there was an “association” between a higher risk of neurodevelopmental disorders in children and “exposure to acetaminophen during pregnancy.”

But to experts, the study simply didn’t pass muster. Baccarelli “repackaged [the study] for journal publication to give it the appearance of legitimacy,” immunologist and science communicator Andrea Love tweeted following the press conference. “He cherry-picked studies and gave parent memory more weight than hard data.”

The paper is “tossed-out courtroom testimony, dressed up for PubMed,” Love added in a followup. “Legitimizing bad science with dangerous policy endangers you when your decisions are based on fear, not facts.”

Even worse, Baccarrelli himself has since attempted to distance himself from the situation, warning that “further research is needed to confirm the association and determine causality,” per the NYT.

It’s far from the first time the Trump administration has made headlines for making baseless scientific claims. Trump’s appointed health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., a notorious anti-vaxxer, has previously called the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine into question, while promoting unproven and potentially dangerous alternative treatments.

Kennedy has also made unfounded claims about mass shootings being caused by video games and put a fellow anti-vaccine zealot in charge of investigating nonexistent links between vaccines and autism.

The Trump administration has also made devastating budget cuts to medical research, triggering a major brain drain.

The news comes less than a month after Centers for Disease Control public health official Demetre Daskalakis quit in spectacular fashion, protesting against the government’s descent into an “Idiocracy”-style assault on science.

“I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health,” he wrote in a resignation letter.

More on RFK Jr.: Trump Shutting Down Cancer Research

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📌 MAROKO133 Hot ai: Report Warns That AI Is About to Make Your Boss a Panopticon O

While the world holds its breath to see if the US tech industry can bring about human-level artificial intelligence — and therefore completely rewrite the social contract and economy — experts are warning current iterations of the tech are already remaking the workplace in insidious ways.

This week, the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), a group representing nearly 45 million workers across 40 European countries, published a comprehensive report about the disturbing impact of algorithms that increasingly control the workplace.

Titled “Negotiating the Algorithm,” the 70-page tome lays out the basic facts about algorithmic management, the use of AI programs to oversee workers on the job. Far from a dystopian fantasy, the ETUC alerts readers to the alarming rise of the tech. In fact, an early study from this year found that 79 percent of job sites across the EU — and 90 percent in the US — already use at least one algorithmic management tool to govern the rank and file.

Though most of us roll our eyes when our bosses roll out a new piece of software at work, algorithmic management is already drastically changing the power dynamics of the workplace. And as the ETUC warns, those changes never seem to pan out in the worker’s favor.

Ultimately, the ETUC guide identifies seven risks — or functions, depending on your point of view — that come from AI governance: discriminatory work assignments, fluctuating wages, loss of worker control, constant surveillance, unreasonable performance evaluations, automated punishment, and non-payment.

“Algorithmic management is used to determine work allocation and pay in ways that are typically opaque and often discriminatory,” the report reads. “Workers have to contend with intensive forms of surveillance which reduce autonomy and undermine privacy. Workers are evaluated in ways that are not transparent and with no opportunity for worker input.”

“Perhaps worst of all,” it continues, “workers face algorithmically-determined punishments, up to and including the loss of their job, sometimes without ever being able to communicate with a human boss.”

While algorithmic management is now built into precarious low-wage jobs such as ride hailing, warehouse labor, and cloudwork, it’s also being rapidly expanded to sectors like therapy, legal work, and healthcare. In other words, just because you’re not making a living off an app now, doesn’t mean you won’t be sometime in the future.

Fortunately, the ETUC offers solutions for fighting the AI panopticon. The first is a handy list of victories workers are already winning across the EU in places like Denmark, where the rent-a-maid app Hilfr agreed to give workers a comprehensive explanation for all algorithmically-determined decisions, building on previously negotiated dignities like a minimum wage and paid sick days.

For cases where the company isn’t so willing to share data about its systems, the report highlights tactics workers can use to crack the algorithm. These start with a polite request for company data according to EU data laws.

If that doesn’t work, there are less official methods to fall back on. These include the sock-puppet technique, where a gig worker creates multiple accounts to compare data against their main profile, reverse engineering, a more labor-intensive peak into the raw data, and “counter apps” like UberCheats, which are used to audit algorithmic management software.

Ultimately, the report concludes, fighting back against algorithmic management isn’t about “reinventing the wheel, it’s about adding on new spokes.”

More on labor: Uber Drivers Say They’re Getting Locked Out of the App and Trapped in a Kafkaesque Limbo When They Try to Dispute It

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🔗 Sumber: futurism.com