In the era of AI-driven language technologies, there is a growing demand for the participation and leadership of deaf communities in sign language technology development, often framed as co-creation. This paper, developed through collaborative and iterative dialogue between the authors with data from informal participant observations, examines the involvement of the European Union of the Deaf in two EU Horizon 2020 projects, EASIER and SignON. These projects aimed to develop mobile translation applications between signed and spoken languages, bringing together predominantly hearing, non-signing technology experts with predominantly hearing sign language academics and organizations representing deaf end users in large multi-partner consortia. While co-creation is sometimes presented as the best or required way to do research or even as emancipatory, it frequently masks systemic issues of power imbalances and tokenism. Drawing from EUD's experiences of these projects, we highlight several inconvenient truths of co-creation, and propose seven lessons for future initiatives: recognizing deaf partners' invisible labour as work, managing expectations about technologies, cripping co-creation processes, exploring alternative methods to mitigate co-creation fatigue, seeking intersectional feedback, ensuring co-creation is not just virtue signalling, and fostering deaf leadership in AI sign language research. We argue for co-creation as a transformative activity that fundamentally alters the status quo and levels the playing field. This necessitates increasing the number of deaf researchers and enhancing AI literacy among deaf communities. Without these critical transformative actions, co-creation risks merely paying lip service to deaf communities.

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported on Elon Musk's increasingly close relationship with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, which has flourished to the point that the two "talk on the phone several times a month." The conversation subjects tend to cover Trump's attempt to regain White House control and the potential opportunities for Musk and his companies, like Tesla and SpaceX, under another potential Trump administration. Musk rejected the report's central conceit--that Trump had discussed an advisory role for him should the former president be reelected--but he certainly keeps behaving like a typical Trump supplicant. Just look at his X posts following Trump's 34-count conviction in the New York hush money trial, in which he refers to the process as "troubling," endorses a Sequoia Capital partner's 300,000 donation to Trump's campaign, proclaims that "great damage was done today to the public's faith in the American legal system," and reply-guys a couple of characteristically lame Babylon Bee headlines. President Joe Biden's reelection campaign has responded with a scoff, declaring that, "Despite what Donald Trump thinks, America is not for sale to billionaires, oil and gas executives, or even Elon Musk."

We are well into the third wave of major investment in artificial intelligence. So it's a fine time to take a historical perspective on the current success of AI. In the 1960s, the early AI researchers often breathlessly predicted that human-level intelligent machines were only 10 years away. That form of AI was based on logical reasoning with symbols, and was carried out with what today seem like ludicrously slow digital computers. Those same researchers considered and rejected neural networks.

Artificial intelligence (AI) for healthcare providers is currently at the peak of inflated expectations, according to Gartner's recently published "Hype Cycle for Healthcare Providers, 2019." This is not a surprising conclusion, given the industry's ongoing claims about disruptive AI-based solutions that will transform healthcare. When you start reading about how "ambient AI" is going to see and hear everything that is going on in an exam room and somehow magically convert that to usable data for analytics and machine learning, you should be very skeptical. This misplaced dream of an all-knowing, all-seeing machine is holding developers back from addressing the real problem: giving clinicians tools they can use at the point of care today. Before we defer to Dr. Alexa for all our healthcare needs, let's first consider what type of AI innovations have the potential to improve healthcare efficiencies -- and which functions don't address what's really broken in healthcare.

François-Marie Arouet, 18th century French author and iconoclast, better known as Voltaire, quipped, "The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease." Though medicine has progressed in the intervening centuries it remains an art informed by science: both the art of bearing witness, of helping people find meaning in the maelstrom of life's immediate and existential challenges and the less appreciated art of managing uncertainty. It is in this latter regard that AI, broadly speaking, holds promise. Precision medicine, optimised systems and proactive population health have all been forecast but arguably more important is the potential liberation of the time and ingenuity of clinicians to do what they are uniquely able to do - to care for other people. Humans doing what humans do best.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe's CEO, has delivered his message that people buy experiences, not products to both U.S. and European audiences this year. Narayen also advised that products [aren't the main] differentiator anymore. Companies are now competing for the hearts and minds of all customers and should aim to exceed their expectations at every point of the journey. News that it's less about the transaction and more about the relationship has given birth to "experience makers" who promise to bring this vision to life. Claire Cronin, the CMO of Virgin Atlantic, also waded into the experience factor by saying, "Tans fade, memories don't." However, the inconvenient truth is that business needs to use data to drive these experiences.

Advances in artificial intelligence and technology combined with the power of a handful of tech behemoths seem to be paving the way for an uncomfortable narrative. Many of the most prominent tech leaders are increasingly warning of how we need to exercise caution. For example, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is marking the 29th anniversary of his invention with an open letter where he calls for large technology firms to be regulated and prevent his original creation from being "weaponized at scale." The forefather of the WWW also advised that "In recent years, we've seen conspiracy theories trend on social media platforms, fake Twitter and Facebook accounts stoke social tensions, external actors interfere in elections, and criminals steal troves of personal data." Berners-Lee believes that many of these challenges have increased because of the concentration of power is now in the hands of a few tech giants.

Here is the latest edition of the IoT Central Digest. Encourage your friends and colleagues to be a part of our community. They can join IoT Central here. You can contribute your thoughts on IoT here. The current political events in Barcelona provide us with a barely-needed reminder that we live in changing times.

"Excuse me," the former vice president says, dabbing a tissue at his nose before offering up an explanation. Outside Gore's New York City office, spring has certainly sprung--early too. This March was the hottest one ever, beating the prior record set in March 2015. The same goes for February and January of this year, and, oh, the eight consecutive months before. Gore knows these statistics by heart. The fact that you might know them too is likely because of him.