Allgemein

Democrats are hoping federal employees will provide information regarding the president and Elon Musk‘s efforts to slash government agencies. Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York), have set up a whistleblower complaint portal for federal workers to submit any reports of what they see as unlawful activities in their respective agencies in response to Elon Musk and his group’s efforts to downsize the federal government. (…) In the latest efforts, Democrats are urging federal workers to resist their advances. The new whistleblower portal is their latest effort to oppose Trump’s actions as they look to form a cohesive message against the administration. In a letter sent to public servants and obtained by The Post, Senate Democrats said that they are ready to support any whistleblower seeking to share information about “wrongdoing, abuse of power, and threats to public safety.” Democrats emphasized the role of the Whistleblower Protection Act in prohibiting retaliation against federal employees who disclose evidence of possible wrongdoing. They also vowed to investigate the Trump administration’s actions through oversight requests, hearings and inquiries. “As Senate Republicans refuse to fulfill their constitutional duty to provide a check on the Executive Branch, Senate Democrats remain steadfast in our commitment to uncovering the truth,” Democrats wrote. “We are prepared to issue demand letters, preserve public records, conduct public hearings, and pursue legal action where necessary.” The online form is similar to one available on Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-Iowa) website, in which Grassley calls for whistleblowers to submit information “regarding wrongdoing within federal agencies or misuse of public dollars.”

via washington post: To watch Musk, Senate Democrats start whistleblower platform for workers

Researchers find that the more people use AI at their job, the less critical thinking they use. A new paper from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University finds that as humans increasingly rely on generative AI in their work, they use less critical thinking, which can “result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.” “[A] key irony of automation is that by mechanising routine tasks and leaving exception-handling to the human user, you deprive the user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgement and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared when the exceptions do arise,” the researchers wrote. The researchers recruited 319 knowledge workers for the study, who self reported 936 first-hand examples of using generative AI in their job, and asked them to complete a survey about how they use generative AI (including what tools and prompts), how confident they are the generative AI tools’ ability to do the specific work task, how confident they are in evaluating the AI’s output, and how confident they are in their abilities in completing the same work task without the AI tool. Some tasks cited in the paper include a teacher using the AI image generator DALL-E to create images for a presentation about hand washing at school, a commodities trader using ChatGPT to “generate recommendations for new resources and strategies to explore to hone my trading skills,” and a nurse who “verified a ChatGPT-generated educational pamphlet for newly diagnosed diabetic patients.” Overall, these workers self-reported that the more confidence they had in AI doing the task, the more they observed “their perceived enaction of critical thinking.” When users had less confidence in the AI’s output, they used more critical thinking and had more confidence in their ability to evaluate and improve the quality of the AI’s output and mitigate the consequences of AI responses.

via 404media: Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”