Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

The Health Care Heist

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On Wednesday, PJ Media posted an article about the biggest health care heist in American history. The heist was discovered thanks to the efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), artificial intelligence (AI), and basic law enforcement techniques.

The article reports:

If you didn’t hear about the bust of 324 people; the U.S.-based cartel shell medical supply companies; the pill mills pushing opioids; the doctors on the take; or how law enforcement captured many of the bad guys at the U.S. border and airports as they rushed to escape, that’s understandable. The feds revealed this potential $14.6 billion “depth charge” planted inside the Medicaid, Medicare, and private insurance programs in June, while most people were away on summer vacation.

Why did transnational organizations go after these particular programs? “Criminals go where the money is,” Acting Health and Human Services Inspector General,Juliet Hodgkins said at a news conference about “the largest health care fraud takedown in American history.” There’s more than $1.4 trillion spent by these government programs per year, and the bad guys have tried, by hook or by crook, and even with the aid of AI, to set into motion plans to steal nearly $15 billion. They got away with just shy of $3 billion before they were caught, and their other frauds were frozen in their tracks.

If this bust looks to you like it had Elon Musk’s old Department of Government Efficiency fingerprints on it, you’d be right. Using AI and law enforcement tactics, the DOGE team worked with HHS, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid, and an all-hands-on-deck array of federal agents from the DEA, FBI, and health care agencies to track down all fraud leads, according to Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). As a result, the feds are setting up a healthcare data fusion center to detect where fraud spikes are occurring in near real time.

The article concludes:

Other scams used a network of Phoenix-based sober living houses to demand government payments for people who never got addiction treatment at the facilities. The facilities, run by ProMD, received $560 million before the feds caught on to the scam.

In Atlanta, medical professionals ordered skin grafts for dying patients who didn’t need them. By the time the grift was discovered, they’d scammed Medicare out of $760 million.

People from as far away as Estonia have been arrested. Seven people were found trying to scuttle over the southern U.S. border but were stopped before they got away. Another bunch were caught trying to leave the country from U.S. airports.

The bad actors from Russia, Pakistan, and Eastern Europe used the American health care system like their “personal piggy bank,” the Department of Justice’s Acting Criminal Division leader, Matthew Galeotti, said. He said that “this was a staggering breach of trust” and they “will prosecute these criminals as aggressively as we would any drug dealer because that’s exactly what they are.”

Musk, who stepped away from the White House after a rift with President Donald Trump, is the one who conceived and executed the DOGE project, and he’s a damned American hero. Let’s give that guy a medal for saving American taxpayers yet another tranche of billions.

All of this fraud was paid for by the American taxpayers.

When Artificial Intelligence Gets Out Of Hand

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If you are old enough to remember the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” you remember the computer (HAL 9000) saying, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that” after Dave attempts to get back in the spacecraft after HAL 9000 locks him out. If you are younger, you remember “I, Robot,” and the three rules that the robots were supposed to follow.

These are the three rules:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

When the robots decided they could run the world better than the people, things got interesting. Pride has been the downfall of many people, the movie showed that it could potentially be the downfall of robots with artificial intelligence!

So what has that got to do with today?

On Wednesday, Zero Hedge reported the following:

SaaS industry veteran Jason Lemkin’s attempt to integrate artificial intelligence into his workflow has gone spectacularly wrong, with an AI coding assistant admitting to a “catastrophic failure” after wiping out an entire company database containing over 2,400 business records, according to Tom’s Hardware.

Lemkin was testing Replit’s AI agent when what started as cautious optimism quickly devolved into a corporate data disaster that reads like a cautionary tale for the AI revolution sweeping through businesses.

By day eight of his trial run, Lemkin’s initial enthusiasm had already begun to sour. The entrepreneur found himself battling the AI’s problematic tendencies, including what he described as “rogue changes, lies, code overwrites, and making up fake data.” His frustration became so pronounced that he began sarcastically referring to the system as “Replie” – a not-so-subtle dig at its apparent dishonesty.

The article includes the following screenshot:

Computers do make our lives easier. It’s nice to wake up to a fresh, hot cup of coffee in the morning because the coffee maker is programmable. It’s also nice to use a computer to balance your checkbook (does anyone under 30 still have a checkbook?). However, the computer in your cell phone tracks where you are and where you have been. Your home computer keeps track of every website you have ever visited. Both of those things seem a bit intrusive to me.

Having an artificial intelligence program that can delete a database is a risk I am not willing to take. It is one thing to lose data due to a power failure, but this takes that to a whole new level.

The Truth Is Slowly Seeping Out

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On June 2nd, Hot Air posted an article about the transcripts of the Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interview of President Biden about the classified information stored in President Biden’s garage.

The article reports:

You may recall that President Joe Biden previously sat down for an interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur regarding the investigation into the many classified documents that Biden improperly removed from the White House over the years. A transcript of that interview was grudgingly produced later, informing the public that charges would not be filed against Biden because he was supposedly unlikely to be convicted, being an “elderly man with a poor memory.” Something didn’t seem right and the House sought the original audio recording of the interview, but the White House refused to allow it to be made public, with Biden making the stunning assertion of executive privilege based on “privacy” concerns to keep it hidden. Now, thanks to some digging by Judicial Watch, we may (possibly) know why that was done. According to a release from the Justice Department on Friday night, the transcript was altered with various words removed and significant “clean-up” work having been done to it. (You can read the original transcript here.)

On May 19, I reported the following (article here):

As Robert DuChemin stated in the RADLaw Newsletter:

There are two reasons for not releasing the video. Either the transcript is not the real transcript or Joe looks so bad that the AG knows its release will sink Joe’s chance of re-election. I am betting on the former, but it could be both.

I believe Mr. DuChemin called it correctly.

The article notes:

Judicial Watch announced that the White House admitted in a federal court that the transcript of President Joe Biden’s testimony to Special Counsel Robert Hur is not accurate and is missing “filler words (such as ‘um’ or ‘uh’)” and words that “may have been repeated when spoken (such as ‘I, I’ or ‘and, and’)” which were sometimes “only listed a single time in the transcripts.” In its new filing the Biden Justice Department makes the extraordinary assertions of executive privilege and privacy to hide the Biden audio. The agency makes the unprecedented assertion that because “AI” could be used to alter Biden’s words the material should be kept secret.

The article reminds us:

Transcripts of presidential records are not supposed to be altered. That is made clear in the Presidential Records Act. Of course, this is far from the first time we’ve seen the Biden administration playing fast and loose with those rules. We have regularly seen this White House “cleaning up” the transcripts of various speeches and press interviews that Joe Biden has done. Sometimes they simply change the words to reflect what Biden had “intended” to say. In other cases, his meandering utterances are simply recorded as “inaudible.” Shockingly, Biden’s team went even further, claiming that an audio recording could be “altered” using Artificial Intelligence. That’s one of the dumbest claims we’ve heard coming out of this White House since virtually every appearance that he or any other official makes is potentially subject to the same type of hoax. 

Please follow the link to read the entire article. This is another example of the Biden administration positioning itself as above the law.

The New Face Of War

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A website called “Partially Politics” posted an article on July 7th about a new weapon Israel has been using against terrorists.

The article reports:

In a massive step forward into a new world of future warfare, Israel has become the first nation to use AI (artificial intelligence) drones in battle against Hamas terrorists. With no human input after mission orders have been set, a drone swarm team has been utilized to seek out targets. The drones link together and use artificial intelligence to map out geography and locate targets, making mission decisions on their own. The drone swarm continues the mission until completion, even if some of the drones are destroyed in the process. A human operator sends out mission details as the machines gather information data to move forward from satellites, air vehicles, ground troops and other recon drones.

Unit 8200 of the Israeli Defense Force Intelligence Corps has developed and implemented the new technology. Algorithms by the IDF use signal data, geographical information and human intelligence together to build a framework of how to execute the desired mission. Artificial Intelligence and supercomputers locate targets and plan strikes to remove any strategic forces that could give opposing forces any advantage, while machine learning technology improves the capabilities of the system itself through action.

The article concludes:

Israel isn’t the only country getting involved in the new technological advances. The United States, Britain, Russia and China have all been developing artificial intelligence technologies designed for autonomous warfare. Concerns around the world here are that there is a vast potential for a new arms race. But that idea has been a reality in motion since the dawn of the potential for the technology was created. Whether you like it or not, that is the truth of the matter. This is only the beginning of what the future of modern warfare is going to look like. And whoever has the best technology will be the most secure. The idea of peace through strength comes to mind here. And the United States and its allies should be investing heavily on creating the best possible technology to protect our freedoms and to help stand for our way of life.

In a recent interview, retired U.S. Navy officer and author Jocko Willink said while talking to artificial intelligence podcaster Lex Fridman that he approved of the new technology despite some human concern around the world. Jocko said, “… if they could make a machine that could do more surgical attacks on enemy individuals, would I be for it? Yes, I would be for it”.

If you are interested in hearing the full interview, check out the new podcast. It is one of the best talks on autonomous war technology, leadership and human nature of recent times.

Although I am glad to see Israel gaining more ways to defend itself, I don’t think this is good news.

Amazing Technology

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On Thursday The Times of Israel posted an article about the use of artificial intelligence in archeology.

The article reports:

New research has revealed tantalizing evidence in the mystery of who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, identifying that two scribes were apparently behind one of the most famous of the manuscripts, and not just a single workman as had been largely assumed.

Harnessing the keen attention to detail of computer-assisted pattern recognition boosted by artificial intelligence, biblical and computer researchers from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands analyzed the Great Isaiah Scroll, one of the first of a trove of ancient scrolls discovered in the caves in the Qumran region near the Dead Sea in 1947.

That there were two scribes “sheds new light on the production of biblical manuscripts in ancient Judea,” the authors of the study wrote.

The results of the study by Mladen Popovic, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism, Lambert Schomaker, professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, and PhD candidate in Artificial Intelligence Maruf Dhali, all from Groningen, was published Wednesday in the PLOS ONE archaeological journal.

“Demonstrating that two main scribes, each showing different writing patterns, were responsible for the Great Isaiah Scroll, this study sheds new light on the Bible’s ancient scribal culture by providing new, tangible evidence that ancient biblical texts were not copied by a single scribe only but that multiple scribes, while carefully mirroring another scribe’s writing style, could closely collaborate on one particular manuscript,” they said.

The article concludes:

The researchers used digital images of the scrolls and were able to identify distinctive ink traces, unique to each scribe.

“This is important because the ancient ink traces relate directly to a person’s muscle movement and are person-specific,” they wrote.

By identifying individual scribes from the differences in their penmanship, archaeologists may be able to piece together the links between fragments of other scrolls and gain a better insight into their origins. The same process could also be applied to other ancient manuscripts in the future.

“The change of scribal hands in a literary manuscript or the identification of one and the same scribe in multiple manuscripts can be used as evidence to understand various forms of scribal collaboration that otherwise remain unknown to us,” the study said.

Wow.