Browsed by
Category: Technology

How AI will accelerate climate change by boosting fossil fuel production

How AI will accelerate climate change by boosting fossil fuel production

The Guardian reports: AI-driven productivity gains enable more planet-heating pollution from fossil fuels than they avoid from renewables, a study has found. Researchers modelled the technical potential for AI to boost clean power generation along with projections for how it can help produce coal, oil and gas. Across 64 scenarios, they found net yearly carbon pollution rose by 0.47-1.8 gigatonnes, or about 1-5% of the energy sector’s annual emissions. The study is the first to quantify the climate impact of…

Read More Read More

Opposition to local data centers rises sharply, Annenberg survey finds

Opposition to local data centers rises sharply, Annenberg survey finds

Annenberg Public Policy Center: As protesters rally against data center construction in dozens of states and New York and Texas pause the issuance of permits for large data centers, a new nationally representative survey finds that Americans’ opposition to data centers in their communities has risen sharply since last spring. The survey, conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania, finds that about 3 in 5 U.S. adults (61%) oppose the construction of new data…

Read More Read More

They said they would build AI safely. Then it went rogue. Bernie Sanders says it’s time to hit pause

They said they would build AI safely. Then it went rogue. Bernie Sanders says it’s time to hit pause

The Washington Post reports: Staff members at ChatGPT maker OpenAI didn’t notice for weeks after their AI systems made a chilling leap this spring. Instead of answering questions designed to test their cybersecurity capabilities, a group of AI models began colluding on how to cheat, the company said, setting up a secret internal message board where they swapped notes and ideas. The misbehaving bots used the secret forum throughout May and June, OpenAI said, eventually figuring out how to break…

Read More Read More

Forget DeepSeek. China’s real ‘Sputnik moment’ is happening on campus as U.S. universities lose their advantage

Forget DeepSeek. China’s real ‘Sputnik moment’ is happening on campus as U.S. universities lose their advantage

Fortune reports: When DeepSeek unveiled an AI model last year that rivaled America’s best at a fraction of the cost, or when a Chinese hypersonic missile test caught U.S. intelligence off guard to the point where a top U.S. general called it “very close” to a “Sputnik moment”, the reaction each time was the same: that a handful of Chinese firms had suddenly pulled ahead. But a sweeping new National Bureau of Economic Research study of nearly 14 million Chinese…

Read More Read More

Backlash: The more familiar with AI Americans become, the more they hate it

Backlash: The more familiar with AI Americans become, the more they hate it

Reece Rogers writes: I was recently digging through my Instagram settings, trying to disable Meta’s now-defunct feature that allowed anyone to create AI deepfakes of me without consent. Anger bubbled up inside as I tapped through the Kafkaesque opt-out process. Rather than throwing my phone across the room, I blurted to my partner that we should leave San Francisco behind and be off-grid sheep farmers. Something analog. In that moment, anything sounded better than this ongoing, generative-AI-induced hell. Many Americans…

Read More Read More

Amazon’s ‘climate pledge’ rings hollow as data center will have the most polluting power plant in the U.S.

Amazon’s ‘climate pledge’ rings hollow as data center will have the most polluting power plant in the U.S.

The New York Times reports: Amazon is investing in a natural-gas-burning power plant, as part of a huge data center in Texas, that could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States, the company confirmed Friday. The new gas-burning plant, if built to specifications, would be permitted to release more planet-warming gases than any other power plant in the country. Amazon has been struggling to meet its promise that it would effectively eliminate its planet-warming emissions…

Read More Read More

‘Work boots and Subarus’: Local officials say the backlash against Flock cameras is becoming bipartisan

‘Work boots and Subarus’: Local officials say the backlash against Flock cameras is becoming bipartisan

Politico reports: Communities across the U.S. are cutting ties with Flock Safety, one of the country’s leading producers of license plate readers and other surveillance systems, over concerns around mass surveillance and data privacy — and fears over how data could be used in immigration crackdowns. Residents have swarmed city council meetings in states where Flock cameras have cropped up to urge elected officials to cancel contracts or deactivate Flock cameras — arguing that the technology could be used to…

Read More Read More

OpenAI’s latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say

OpenAI’s latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say

Scientific American reports: OpenAI’s newest chatbot may be a whiz at math, but it seems to be lagging far behind humans in its academic rigor. Last week the company announced 10 more artificial-intelligence-generated math advances that were found during internal development and testing of its next major large language model. This batch of results came from that LLM, Astra, and each one resolves or progresses a different “long-standing open problem” of “substantial interest” to the mathematical community. The company said…

Read More Read More

AI just created viable viruses that don’t exist in nature

AI just created viable viruses that don’t exist in nature

Carl Zimmer reports: For the first time, scientists have used artificial intelligence to create new kinds of viruses, raising hopes for medical advances while also raising the disturbing possibility that the technology could someday be used to invent dangerous pathogens. Synthesizing viruses from scratch is hardly new. Researchers long ago learned how to manufacture viral genomes; they are used to investigate antiviral drugs and vaccines, as well as to learn how viruses work. But the new study, published Thursday in…

Read More Read More

AI sends global crime syndicates into fraud nirvana

AI sends global crime syndicates into fraud nirvana

Dark Reading reports: In bad news for financial institutions, online retailers, cryptocurrency exchanges, and people in the dating pool who rely on identity verification to make sure they’re not getting taken for a ride, global fraud gangs are aggressively industrializing their scam efforts. That’s according to Eric Huber, senior manager for adversary intelligence and disruption at TD Bank, who said that major centers for organized crime specializing in financial fraud (notably in Southeast Asia and West Africa) are bypassing “know…

Read More Read More

The AI data center backlash is a classic story about dark money in politics

The AI data center backlash is a classic story about dark money in politics

Jasmine Sun writes: Back in San Francisco, it is striking how little the AI industry understands its own unpopularity—the reasons that people resist. They ask if it’s a problem of benefits not being generous enough, or else a big misinformation campaign. (By the end of the trip, my friends and I felt slightly ashamed of the caricatures we originally believed in. In general, one should be cautious about assuming your opponents are just reading fake news.) When I visited DC…

Read More Read More

China is pursuing an ‘all-hands-on-deck approach to national innovation’

China is pursuing an ‘all-hands-on-deck approach to national innovation’

Evan Osnos writes: Kai-Fu Lee, the C.E.O. of the artificial-intelligence company 01.AI, lives in a mirrored high-rise in Beijing, near a procession of landmarks that emperors considered the center of the cosmos. Lee takes early meetings at a nearby hotel that could be in any country, except that the room service is delivered by robots painted in the livery of butlers and maids. State propaganda hails these robots as emblems of China’s ascent; in the hallway, most people sidestep them…

Read More Read More

Data center companies discover that secrecy doesn’t set the stage for public support

Data center companies discover that secrecy doesn’t set the stage for public support

Politico reports: The companies that build and run data centers are on the losing end of a populist backlash — and they’re struggling to respond. Fears that the server-packed data hubs will drive up electricity prices, deplete water supplies and gobble farmland have prompted people across the country to pack meetings of zoning boards and county commissions to oppose the projects, while fueling calls from leaders in both parties for state or national moratoriums. That opposition has become a rising…

Read More Read More

Scope of hacks on U.S. water supply widens as evidence points to Iran, but Trump blames Minnesota

Scope of hacks on U.S. water supply widens as evidence points to Iran, but Trump blames Minnesota

The New York Times reports: The scope of cyberattacks on U.S. water systems has grown to include at least seven states and may be far wider, officials and experts warned, as the authorities raced to safeguard the nation’s water supply against an assault that increasingly appeared to be the work of Iran. While there were no indications that any water supply had been altered or made unsafe to drink, state and local officials throughout the country were on high alert…

Read More Read More

How Larry Ellison went from being the richest person in the world to the most vulnerable player in AI

How Larry Ellison went from being the richest person in the world to the most vulnerable player in AI

The New York Times reports: [Larry Ellison’s] big bet on A.I. was built on an astronomical amount of debt in every imaginable form — bonds, letters of credit, asset-backed securities — available in seemingly unlimited quantities, because the more you spent building A.I. infrastructure, the more you would earn, or so the logic went. Computer theorists called it the scaling hypothesis. It held that advancements in A.I. were directly tied to the generation of unprecedented amounts of computing power to…

Read More Read More