The largest nursing union in the US, National Nurses United (NNU), is sounding the alarm about the use of AI in healthcare. In April, the union’s affiliate California Nurses Association (CNA) protested an AI conference helmed by managed care consortium Kaiser Permanente.

Like workers in other sectors who are worried about AI encroachment, the nurses fear that the tech is contributing to the devaluation of their skills amid what they say is already a “chronic” understaffing crisis, nurses reported in an NNU survey of 2,300 registered nurses and members in early 2024.

But the NNU, which represents approximately 225,000 nurses across the country, also claims healthcare operators are using AI hype as a pretext to rush half-baked and potentially harmful technologies into service, says Michelle Mahon, NNU’s assistant director of nursing practice. Mahon warns continuous data collection and analysis is not a substitute for nursing knowledge or physical resources.

Read more here.—TM

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The last time an official set of “computer science curricula” came out, Twitter had just gone public, Google Glass headsets had adorned a few heads, and Vine was still a thing.

In 2013, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS) released their once-a-decade recommendations for “the knowledge and competencies students should attain for degrees in computer science and related disciplines at the undergraduate level.” Recommended study areas of the time included simulation and modeling, programming-language principles, and human–computer interaction.

The groups released its latest curricula guidelines in early 2024, and a lot has ch-AI-nged since Her hit cinemas.

As universities’ computer-science programs adjust to AI applications, large language models, and the high-performance computers supporting both, Ramapo College professor and ACM Steering Committee Co-chair Amruth Kumar wants computer science students everywhere to always confront one area of study, no matter the class: ethics.

Keep reading here.—BH

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