News (1,607 posts)

Most people generally are more concerned about the immediate risks of artificial intelligence than they are about a theoretical future in which AI threatens humanity. A new study reveals that respondents draw clear distinctions between abstract scenarios and specific tangible problems and particularly take the latter very seriously.

Pragmatism offers answers to many of the questions that have interested philosophers since Plato. There is, though, no single programme or set of tenets around which every pragmatist unites, and the tradition contains very different and sometimes conflicting ideas. In what follows, I set out some ideas that I think are particularly useful.

By ingesting billions of creations, chatbots learn to talk, and image synthesizers learn to draw. Along the way, the AI companies behind them treat our shared culture like an inexhaustible resource to be strip-mined, with little thought for the consequences…. Today, the AI industry’s business models unintentionally echo the ways in which early industrialists approached forests and fisheries—as free inputs to exploit without considering ecological limits…. If we let AI systems deplete or pollute the human outputs they depend on, what happens to AI models—and ultimately to human society—over the long term?

Reggie Premo and a small team from the University of Nevada-Reno Extension host workshops on gardening and creating hoop houses, similar to greenhouses, to help tribes statewide increase food security.

High Suicide Rate: U.S. farmers are 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population. In Utah, they die by suicide at the third-highest rate by vocation in the state.
Temporary Help: A federal program offering Utah farmers free therapy was so successful that it ran out of money in four months. But lawmakers have chosen not to continue funding it.
Stressors Facing Farmers: Farmers experience unique stressors, including fluctuating market prices, unpredictable weather and the expectation they handle mental health issues on their own.

In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the State Department was launching an AI-powered “Catch and Revoke” initiative to accelerate the cancellation of student visas. Algorithms would collect data from social media profiles, news outlets, and doxing sites to enforce the January 20 executive order targeting foreign nationals who threaten to “overthrow or replace the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands.” The arsenal was built in concert with American tech companies over the past two decades and already deployed, in part, within the U.S. immigration system.

With the government under fire over its planned benefit cuts, the anti-poverty charity Trussell said that failing to tackle hunger and hardship would have severe human costs and cause damage to the wider economy and public finances.

Related organizations such as the Non-life Insurance Association and the Seoul Family Court are taking commemorative photos after signing an agreement to support protected children. (From left) Park Il-kyu, chairman of the Korea Social Workers’ Association, Lee Won-hyung, president of the Seoul Family Court, Lee Byung-rae, chairman of the Non-life Insurance Association, and Lee Jong-ik, vice chairman of the Korea School Social Workers’ Association.

I spent the better part of two days and nights listening to students answer questions at the Foy desk (above), where phones have been ringing since 1953, when James E. Foy, Auburn’s then dean of students, opened the line as a resource for students and then as a service to the public. For just as long, students who sit there have been answering any question asked of them—or at least tried their best.

The proposed state budget released by the governor’s office earlier this year includes $5 million for the Homes for Heroes program, which would pay for housing solutions for veterans, such as rental assistance, along with counseling and other social services. The governor’s proposal would also fund veteran treatment courts, which exist in some Arizona courts to connect veterans accused of crimes with programs to address underlying issues, including substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Autonomous weapons, which select and apply force to targets based on sensor rather human inputs, would contravene the rights to life, peaceful assembly, privacy, and remedy as well as the principles of human dignity and non-discrimination. Technological advances and military investments are now spurring the rapid development of autonomous weapons systems that would operate without meaningful human control.

A Scottish Labour FOI has now uncovered more information about the scale of the crisis in CAMHS. Across Scotland there are kids waiting not months but years for mental health treatment…. Last year one young person in Edinburgh finally started treatment with CAMHS after a shocking 2,291 day wait – that’s more than six years. This year another waited 1,247 days to be seen – over three and a half years.

Vice Chairwoman Tran Thi Dieu Thuy is visiting veterans who directly participated in the Ho Chi Minh Campaign in 1975

The bill requires the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection (DESPP), in consultation with the Police Officer Standards and Training Council (POST), to establish a social work and law enforcement project at Southern Connecticut University, according to the bill’s analysis.

A leaked paper reveals that Germany’s conservative political parties, the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), want to add a clause to Germany’s Nationality Law to allow the country to revoke German nationality from dual nationals if they are deemed “supporters of terrorism, antisemites and extremists.” The proposal does not define who would be considered an “antisemite,” a “terrorist supporter,” or an “extremist.” None of the terms are defined in any offenses in the criminal law, and it is unclear what, if any, safeguards would exist to prevent arbitrary and discriminatory application, and violations of human rights.

The human rights charity produced a new report warning of the growing damage being done to those on benefits…. Amnesty spoke to hundreds of benefits claimants in producing the report, including dozens in Scotland. As well as this, they spoke to benefits advisors in Scotland and across the UK.

BASW England worked with Sally Jameson MP to submit a series of parliamentary questions

Selangor Women Development and Social Welfare Committee chairman Anfaal Saari said the state Social Welfare Department was also working to trace the next of kin of the 12 boys and six girls.

Relatives of Venezuelan migrants deported from the US to a maximum security prison in El Salvador attend a vigil in front of the El Salvadoran embassy in Caracas

Earlier in April, doctors at the National Institutes of Health made a promising step in the fight against cancer, announcing an immunotherapy treatment was able to shrink gastrointestinal tumors for about a quarter of patients. But NIH staffing shortages, layoffs and cuts are threatening to delay the rollout of this promising development.

This past week, the University of Florida was on the brink of hiring a new dean of its College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Then officials suddenly called off the search under pressure from Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration, which alleged that the candidates were not in alignment with the state’s policies opposing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

As Chair of the British Association of Social Workers (BASW UK), I’ve had the privilege of representing our profession at a number of recent events focused on the growing role of artificial intelligence in social care and social work. What’s clear from these events is that AI is no longer a distant concept—it’s here, and it’s reshaping how we think about care, ethics, rights, and the role of social work itself.

Inspectors say Blackburn with Darwen Council’s social workers “take time to develop rapport and trust with children”

But while students, faculty and advocates across the country expressed measured hope that some university leaders were starting to grow a “backbone”, they noted it was students and faculty who were leading the charge and mounting the pressure that forced university leaders to act.

David Green, president and executive director for SEIU 721 rallies more than 200 social workers for lower caseloads in front of the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration in downtown Los Angeles in 2023. More than 55,000 of the union’s LA County employees are preparing for a 48-hour strike beginning at 7 p.m. Monday, April 28, 2025.

Preliminary results from our ongoing research on AI companionship… suggest a fine line between supportive, empowering companionship, and unhealthy psychological dependence, a tension we plan to explore further as data collection and analysis progress. In a world where AI convincingly simulates human emotions, it’s up to us as consumers to critically assess what role these robotic friends should play in our lives.

The proposed Green Paper changes are supposed to be all about getting people into employment. But as a number of claimants living with multiple sclerosis (MS) told the Benefits and Work PIP survey, cuts to personal independence payment (PIP) will have exactly the opposite effect – it will cost them their jobs.

More than 100,000 households are living in temporary accommodation in England.

The City of Edinburgh Council formally declared a housing emergency in 2023

Most of us claim to abhor animal abuse. Racetrack realities call our pious claims into question. Truth be told, we humans excel at using other animals, extracting wealth from them, exhausting them, discarding them. Now, for the 151st time, the Kentucky Derby will showcase our arrogance and pretend it’s an elegant sport. The opposite is true. Make it stop. Above: A sculpture of Barbaro, one of the horses who has died in the Kentucky Derby

Traffic from bots run by artificial intelligence companies is disrupting scientific journal websites. Some publications report that their websites are now visited more by bots than by genuine users. AI firms typically use bots to access scholarly content and scrape whatever data they can to train the large language models (LLMs) that power their writing assistance tools and other products. While some scholarly publishers have signed deals giving access to AI firms, advocates for authors and rights holders have said scientists and academics should be given a chance to opt out of this practice and should receive compensation and credit when their papers are used to train AI chatbots.

Mariah and Eliza Blasko, sisters from the Youngstown area, will walk across the stage together this May as they both graduate from Youngstown State University’s social work program – Mariah with her master’s and Eliza with her bachelor’s.

Social workers in Cayuga County are raising alarms over overwhelming workloads and inadequate resources, warning that they cannot be held responsible if a crisis were to occur.

Seventeen men died in Welsh prisons last year. Their tragic deaths highlight the problems with Wales’s lack of a judiciary.

Cold and damp homes are having a big impact on children, a poll from the Social Workers Union has found. The union is calling on the government to fund public services and upgrade homes to keep children from living in unsuitable housing

In a decade-long multi-institutional study, U of A psychologists teamed up with Radboud University in the Netherlands to develop a precision treatment approach for depression that gives patients individualized recommendations based on multiple characteristics, such as age and gender.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:The social media company Meta gained an injunction against a former employee this week. She is now banned from discussing her criticism of the company. But before that injunction, Sarah Wynn-Williams recorded an interview with NPR. …. Why do you call the book “Careless People”?

SARAH WYNN-WILLIAMS: Because it’s true.

INSKEEP: In what way are they careless?

WYNN-WILLIAMS: The smallest and biggest ways. Little things, like how many people who worked at the social media company that wouldn’t let their own children on the service, through to really big things like working with the Chinese Communist Party to build a censorship tool to meet their specifications

The new voucher-style tax credits have major differences from the grants lawmakers killed. The tax credits are off-limits to public school students, while the grants went predominantly to this group. And there’s limited state oversight on how the private education tax credits will be used, while the grants to public school families were only allowed to be spent with state-approved educational vendors.

Universities do things private companies with research capacities cannot: train research talent, conduct basic research with uncertain payoffs, and distribute knowledge as a public good.

American ideas about research and higher education, including academic freedom, are globally influential. Its research universities dominate international rankings. The list goes on. However, America’s global academic leadership is coming to an abrupt end. This article points out the important reasons why this is taking place.

Over a fifth of social workers working with children, young people and families have seen their service remove a child or children from their family in the last three years where unsafe or inappropriate housing conditions was a key contributing factor. Unsafe housing conditions can include maintenance issues, mould, damp, insect or vermin infestations or cramped conditions. More broadly, 78% of all social workers strongly agree that housing conditions are a concern for people they support, with 36% strongly agreeing that over the last three years the number of people they help living in unsafe or inappropriate housing conditions has increased.

“Schemas” are mental blueprints that filter how we see ourselves, others and the world. Most of us are not consciously aware of them. Yet schemas run deep. Problematic ones – such as “I am a failure” or “others can’t be trusted” or “the world is scary and unsafe” – can affect our mental health and lead us to destructive patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

By slashing teams that gather critical data, the administration has left the federal government with no way of understanding if policies are working — and created a black hole of information whose consequences could ripple out for decades.

Student presenters from left to right: Noah Walker, Tylaa Berry, Sah’Myah Holloway, Cassidy Jones, and Samuel Jonah Walker.

Hundreds of children die in Texas each year from abuse and neglect. In an effort to preserve families, the state has employed several policies and laws intended to reduce the number of kids entering the system for various reasons — at times with grave results. Simultaneously — rather than bolster services to keep children safe — the state narrowed eligibility rules to access them, rejecting families in record numbers.

Two other journals did not want to be named for the story. Along with NEJM, CHEST, and Obstetrics and Gynecology, there are now at least five medical journals that have received letters from the DOJ — and there are likely others. “It’s likely that letters were sent to many more journals,” Reinhart told MedPage Today. “CHEST’s was simply the first to leak.”

According to a Guardian report on 17 April the government is offering MPs unhappy with the cuts the chance to abstain or even simply miss the vote altogether, without any threat of punishment. Backbenchers claim there are now 55 MPs prepared to rebel at the vote and another 100 who are still considering their position.

Central to this transformation is DOGE, which is tasked via an executive order to “promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization.” An additional executive order calls for the federal government to eliminate its information silos. By building interoperable systems, DOGE can enable real-time, cross-agency access to sensitive information and create a centralized database on people within the U.S. These developments are framed as administrative streamlining but lay the groundwork for mass surveillance.

The University of Washington School of Social Work is excited to announce that Dr. Kirk “Jae” James, a clinical associate professor and director of the DSW program at the NYU Silver School of Social Work, is the keynote speaker for the 2025 SSW graduation.