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Utah Governor Signs Controversial a bill on Thursday that would require minors to obtain the consent of a guardian before joining social media platforms, in what would be the most aggressive move by state or federal lawmakers to protect children online.

As part of a bill called the Utah Social Media Regulation Act Social media platforms will be required to perform age verification for all Utah residents, ban all advertising to minors, and impose curfews making their sites offline from 10:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. to anyone under 18. The bill would also require social platforms to give parents access to their teens’ accounts.

legislation, I’m sorry, what introduced by Republican Senator Michael McKel and accepted by Republican Governor Spencer Cox, effective March 1, 2024.

“When it comes down to it, [the bill] it’s about protecting our children,” McKell said in a statement to CNN, citing how depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts have “surged” among teenagers in Utah and across the United States along with the rise of social networking sites. “As a legislator and parent, I believe this bill is the best way to prevent our children from the negative and sometimes life-threatening effects of social media.”

The law comes after years of U.S. lawmakers calling for new measures to protect teens online, amid concerns about social platforms leading young users down harmful rabbit holes, allowing new forms of bullying and harassment, and exacerbating what has been described as an adolescent mental health crisis in the country. However, to date no federal law has been adopted.

Utah is the first of a wider list of states making similar proposals. For example, in Connecticut and Ohio, legislators work on the adoption of the law this will require social media companies to get parental permission before users under 16 can join.

“We can assume that other methods, such as the Utah bill, may find their way into the plans of other states, especially if action is not taken at the federal level,” said Michael Inouye, an analyst at ABI Research. “Eventually, if enough states pass similar or related legislation, we may see a more concerted effort at the federal level to codify these (probably) disparate state laws as part of an all-American policy.”

Industry experts and big tech companies have long been calling on the US government to introduce regulations that could help keep young social media users safe. But even before the bill was passed, some voiced concerns about its implications. Electronic Frontier Foundation, Digital Rights Group, said Utah’s specific set of regulations are “dangerous” when it comes to user privacy, adding that the bill would make user data less secure, Internet access less private, and infringe on basic rights for young users.

“Social media provides a lifeline for many young people in addition to community, education and networking,” said Jason Kelly, director of activism at EFF. “They use it in part because it can be private… A law that would restrict access to social media and require parental consent and supervision of minors would irreparably damage young people’s ability to protect their privacy and deter them from exercising their rights. ”

Lucy Ivey, an 18-year-old TikTok influencer who is a student at the University of Utah Valley, agreed, saying some of her friends in the LGBTQ community may run into trouble with the change.

“I am concerned about this bill because it will take away privacy for teenagers, and many children have poor relationships with their parents or do not have a reliable guardian who would be needed to access social networks.” she told CNN. “I think about my LGBTQ friends; some of them had a hard time with their parents because of their sexuality or identity and may lose an important place where they can be themselves, be seen and heard.”

Ivey, who launched a publication called our era at the age of 15 and expanded her content on TikTok, said she was also concerned about how the bill would affect content creators like herself. (If a legal guardian does not approve of teens’ online activity or digital presence, those individuals may have to suspend their accounts before they turn 18.)

“With a new law like this, they may now be intimidated and discouraged by the legal hoops required to use social media out of fear of the authorities or their parents, or out of fear of losing their privacy at a time when teenagers find out what are they. Ivy said.

facebook parent Meta told CNN that it has the same goals as parents and politicians, but the company said it also wants young people to have a safe and positive online experience and that its platforms remain accessible. Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of security, said the company “will continue to work closely with experts, policy makers and parents on these important issues.”

Representatives for TikTok and Snap did not respond to a request for comment.

Given the bill is unprecedented, it’s unclear exactly how social media will adapt. For example, legislation requires platforms to disable algorithms for “suggested content.” This particular guidance can help keep teens from falling into the rabbit holes of potentially harmful content, but it can also create new problems. This means that the company will no longer have oversight and control over the downgrading of problematic content that may appear in a user’s feed.

Some of the bill’s guidelines may also be difficult to enforce. Inoue said minors can “steal” identity – from family members who don’t use social media, for example – to create accounts they can access and use without supervision. VPNs can also make it harder to map IP addresses to user states, he says.

But even if the legislative moves by Utah and other states turn out to be misguided, Inoue says “these early efforts are at least drawing attention to these issues.”

Telecontrol physical robot could become an important profession in the future, according to Sanctuary AIbased in Vancouver, Canada. The company also believes it could provide an opportunity to teach robots how to perform tasks currently far beyond their (mechanical) reach and imbue machines with the physical sense of the world that some claim is necessary to unlock human-level artificial intelligence. .

Industrial robots are powerful, precise, and mostly stubbornly stupid. They cannot apply the precision and responsiveness needed to perform delicate manipulation tasks. This is partly why the use of robots in factories is still relatively limited, and it still takes an army of workers to assemble all the awkward parts inside the iPhone.

But if such work means nothing to humans, why not give up the complexity of developing an algorithm to do this work?

Here is one of Sanctuary’s robots – the upper half of a humanoid – performing a series of complex manipulation tasks. Behind the scenes, a man in a virtual reality headset and gloves with sensors controls the robot remotely.

Sanctuary recently conducted what he calls the first “real test” of one of his robots., by making such a humanoid work in a store near the startup’s headquarters. The company believes that the ability to perform physical work remotely can help address the labor shortage many companies face today.

Some robots are already getting remote help from humans when they get stuck, as I wrote before. The limitations of AI mean that robots working in restaurants, offices and on the street as deliveries get confused in unusual situations. For example, the difficulty of fully autonomous driving means that some firms are working to bring self-driving trucks onto the roads.

Sanctuary founders Geordie Rose and Susannah Gilbert ran Kindred, another robotic remote control company that was acquired in 2020 by Ocado, a British supermarket firm that makes extensive use of automation. In this video, the couple talk about history and plans of the company for the future.

Ultimately, the goal is to use data from humans remotely controlling robots to teach algorithms to do more tasks autonomously. Gilbert, Sanctuary’s CTO, believes achieving human intelligence in machines will require them to interact with and learn from the physical world. (Sorry ChatGPT.)

OpenAI, the company behind ChatgGPT, is also showing interest in remote-controlled humanoids. The company is investing $23.5 million in 1X, a startup developing a humanoid robot. “OpenAI Startup Fund believes in the approach and impact that 1X can have on the future of work,” says Brad Lightcap, OpenAI COO and OpenAI Startup Fund Manager.

For humans to assist telecommuting robots, AI may also need to be developed to facilitate human-machine collaboration. Chelsea Finnassistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley, recently shared the details exciting research project this includes using machine learning to allow cheap, remote-controlled robotic arms to operate smoothly and accurately. This technology could make it easier for humans to remotely control robots in more situations.

I don’t think I would really enjoy driving a robot all day long, especially if I knew this robot would one day turn around and kick me out the door. But it can make working from home accessible to more people, and it can also make certain types of work more accessible. Alternatively, we may have just gotten a glimpse of a potentially dystopian future for the workplace.

This is an edition of the WIRED Fast Forward newsletter, Will Knight’s weekly newsletter from the future, dedicated to advances in AI and other technologies designed to change our lives.

V most downloaded app in the world is in hot water. Last week, the Biden administration demanded that Chinese-owned TikTok be sold or face a national ban in the US due to security and privacy concerns, and TikTok’s CEO will testify on these issues before Congress on Thursday.

The app poses a real national security threat that the US government has to contend with. But the reality is that achieving a nationwide ban or forced divestment will be difficult.

Concerns are mounting over TikTok’s disturbing history of protecting user data. class action lawsuit alleging that the app sends personal, personally identifiable and biometric data to third parties without user consent, settled for one of the largest payouts in history privacy lawsuits – $92 million – in 2021. FBI and Justice Department are also investigating ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, for using the app to spy on American citizens, including journalists. US, UK, Canada and European Union already banned TikTok on government devices. India banned the app across the country in 2020.

ByteDance relies on Chinese government approval to operate, putting it under pressure from which firms like Meta are fleeing. Yet even while raising countless red flags due to its ownership structure and privacy concerns, TikTok outperforms the other leading social media companies in the US, hugely shaping how people get information and remaining extremely popular. The company has over 150 million monthly active users only in the USA.

TikTok has already survived a ban attempt by the US government. The Trump administration first proposed a ban on the app in 2020, but that attempt was halted federal courtswhich questioned the validity of claims of national security risks and ruled that the move exceeded the limits emergency economic powers of the administration.

The app ban also raises serious 1st Amendment concerns. In 2020, along with a proposed ban on TikTok, the Trump administration tried to ban WeChat, the Chinese messaging and social media app, but the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that due to Role of WeChat as the only means by which many people could reliably communicate in China, the app represented a unique form of communication. Thus, blocking its use would violate the rights of users. 1st amendment rights. While TikTok does not play the same primary communication role, similar arguments for the app’s distinctiveness as a communication medium could result in any bans on private use subject to scrutiny and lengthy legal scrutiny.

For now, instead of a ban, the Biden administration is proposing to sell ByteDance to TikTok. This process has some precedents, including the US government’s successful attempt to change ownership of Grindr through a federal interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (which TikTok review). In March 2019, the Committee used the power granted to it by the Foreign Investment Risk Assessment Modernization Law to require the then owner of Grindr, China’s Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. Ltd., sell with link US national security concerns over the app’s access to sensitive personal information. A little over a year after forced expropriation was announcedGrindr was acquired by West Hollywood investment group San Vicente Acquisition Partners.

But after that sale, China created fences to protect TikTok and other Chinese tech companies. Amid legal troubles with the TikTok ban, the Trump administration has attempted to force the TikTok sale to a US company. But then the Chinese Ministry of Commerce updated its list of “prohibited or restricted export technologies” to include “services of personalized information recommendations based on data analysis“. In practice, this meant that the Chinese government had to agree to any sale of TikTok that would allow foreign companies to access the application’s algorithm.

The Chinese government has also enacted a law that allows the national security data of all Chinese firms, including ByteDance, to be audited and receive gold shares or a government financial stake in Subsidiary of ByteDance. On top of that, the widespread adoption of TikTok provides ByteDance with an opportunity to reach more users and develop robust new technologies in areas such as AI, deep forgeries and face recognition. As part of China’s program to merge civilian and military technologies, these technologies are also becoming China’s national security assets. Any sale of TikTok would likely require the cooperation of the Chinese government in a deal that works against its interests.

For the U.S., the political cost of a TikTok ban will increase the longer there is no resolution. More users are joining the app every day, making it an even more important communication tool. TikTok’s security concerns may be bipartisan, but have yet to overcome the social media app’s popularity.

Ainn Kokas is the author of Trading Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty.