The conflict of interest is pretty obvious. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are backing a bill that funds teaching kids to use... OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft products. "AI literacy" as defined in the bill is literally "the ability to use artificial intelligence effectively."
That's not literacy, that's onboarding lol.
Real digital literacy teaches how systems work, who profits from them, and how to think critically about them. This bill will in practice hand curriculum design to the same vendors who endorsed it.
Teaching kids to prompt ChatGPT is not the same as teaching them to understand what ChatGPT is. Nobody funding this wants the latter.
"Our goal is not to make money out of this data" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a company that just committed $10B to robotaxis and is taking equity in the same AV companies it would be supplying.
The actually interesting part isn't the sensor grid, that's years away and has real consent, compensation, and regulatory problems nobody's talking about. It's shadow mode: letting AV companies sim-run their models against millions of real Uber trips without putting a car on the road. That works today. That's the product.
The sensor grid is the press release. Shadow mode is the business.
Also completely absent from this article: do the drivers whose cars become "rolling data collection platforms" get anything? A cut? A notification? A commemorative badge? Uber has a rich history of finding creative ways to extract value from its driver network, so I'm sure they've thought carefully about this.
A make-me-root bug sitting in the kernel since 2017 and the LTS branches still don't have a clean backport. That's a long window for anything running 6.12 or older