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"ISSUES with the online learning and teaching process has caused students from the low-income group to be left behind, said the National Union of the Teaching Profession (NUTP)."

"This is the biggest concern. I can't overstate how big of a problem this is. I'd be the first that wishes I could wave a magic wand and have an easy solution where all of this could be solved. A teacher I know says there's just 5 percent or 10 percent of her kids in Mountain View, Calif., who are just checked out. She can't get them to show up. She can even see that their language has degraded because they haven't spent as much time with adults or peers in an academic setting."

"Those who design this stuff are plainly doing so for people close in age to themselves. But surely no harm would come from them considering whether their parents or grandparents would have any chance of fathoming out whatever new consumer electronics they are working on."

"This takes us to Kerala in south India, home to about 34 million people. There, the communist-led state government is launching something called the Kerala Fibre Optical Network (KFON) - and it's a major milestone. (It is worth noting the irony that the communist government, which has a history of opposing the introduction of computers, is now at the forefront of this digital initiative.) In 2016, the state recognised the internet as a basic citizen's right, joining other polities like Finland, Costa Rica and France. Next on the agenda: making this new right mean something. Despite facing various setbacks - such as the pandemic and a corruption allegation that led to the arrest of the senior bureaucrat who was previously in charge of KFON (he denies the allegation) - the project has finally been launched. It's a fibre-optic broadband network project, aiming to provide affordable and reliable internet connectivity to every household, government institution and business entity in the state."

"Abbott's experience mirrors the situation faced by Africans who don't speak English. Many language models like ChatGPT do not perform well for languages with smaller numbers of speakers, especially African ones. But a new venture called Lelapa AI, a collaboration between Abbott and a biomedical engineer named Pelonomi Moiloa, is trying to use machine learning to create tools that specifically work for Africans."

"For many experts however, the greatest risk to the internet isn't sabotage, espionage, or even rogue anchors - but the uneven spread of the cable infrastructure that threads across the globe, binding the world's digital networks together. "There aren't cables everywhere," says Starosielski. "There is a concentration in the north Atlantic Ocean connecting the United States and Europe but there are not that many in the South Atlantic.""