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School buses across the United States may soon become rolling surveillance networks. BusPatrol, which has already installed AI cameras on tens of thousands of buses, now plans to activate automatic license plate reading on those vehicles and share the location data of every car they pass with law enforcement. The company frames it as a safety tool, but critics see something else entirely — a publicly trusted institution quietly deputized as a mass surveillance fleet.
That tension between technology and trust found an unlikely echo from the Vatican this week. Pope Francis released a document warning that artificial intelligence risks creating, in his words, new forms of dehumanization, particularly when control of the technology remains concentrated in the hands of the few. It is a rare moment when a two-thousand-year-old institution and a Silicon Valley critic are essentially reading from the same page.
And in Spain, regulators have moved to block prediction market platforms Polymarket and Kalshi, citing the absence of gambling licences. The move raises a question the industry has long tried to sidestep — whether markets built on forecasting real-world events are fundamentally a form of wagering, regardless of how they are framed. Spain, for now, has its answer.
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