Today I’m moving from one temporary location to another, because the renovations on my house are behind schedule, and the place I’ve been living in already had someone booked for February. But in between stints of packing for the move this week, I read a lot of interesting things. Here are five I wanted to highlight.
Millions of Americans Don’t Have Documents Proving Their Citizenship Readily Available
“Requiring proof of citizenship would solve nothing, but it would create major barriers to registration for eligible voters, especially those who already face disproportionate barriers to participation in our democracy.”
Last fall’s razor-thin victory for fascism in the US was partly due to lack of turnout among Democratic voters. While a lot of pundits talk about voters being lazy, the fact is that voter suppression tactics were also partly responsible for depressing turnout. The GOP has for decades cried wolf about non-citizens voting to skew elections, but the incidents of illegal voting are so rare that they can’t affect the outcome of elections. Conservatives know this, of course, and hide their plans to disenfranchise as many voters as possible behind “election integrity” efforts like this one. They can’t win elections based on their abhorrent policies, so they’ll win by limiting who can vote to those who, like them, hate American democracy and its people.
Explained: Generative AI’s environmental impact
“The demand for new data centers cannot be met in a sustainable way. The pace at which companies are building new data centers means the bulk of the electricity to power them must come from fossil fuel-based power plants.”
Contrary to claims by AI hype men that AI will solve global warming, the data centers needed to support more AI is contributing to rising greenhouse gasses that are driving us ever closer to the tipping point in the global average temperature. But it’s not only the data centers–every use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude also contributes to the problem far more than a simple web search does. But the AI hucksters keep pushing casual usage of this wasteful technology.
AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt
“The amount of power that AI models require is already astronomical, and I’m making it worse. And my view of that is, OK, so if I do nothing, AI models, they boil the planet. If I switch this on, they boil the planet. How is that my fault?”
As if contributing to climate catastrophe weren’t bad enough, AI companies are notorious for vacuuming up data from every website they can find, even when administrators define their sites as off-limits to crawling. Some hackers are creating tools that poison AI models with bad data and trap them in an “infinite maze” of bogus files and links. But these tarpits also make AI tools work harder, which means that defending against them also contributes to their terrible environmental impact.
Anthropic chief says AI could surpass “almost all humans at almost everything” shortly after 2027
“We’ve recognized that we’ve reached the point as a technological civilization where the idea, there’s huge abundance and huge economic value, but the idea that the way to distribute that value is for humans to produce economic labor, and this is where they feel their sense of self worth,” he [Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei] added. “Once that idea gets invalidated, we’re all going to have to sit down and figure it out.”
As I studied AI tools and learned about the technology behind them last year, I kept seeing data scientists say that AI wasn’t intended to replace humans, but also say that AI will “soon” be able to do everything humans can do but do it better. That… is a recipe for replacing humans and a reason why computer science majors really ought to be forced to take more humanities courses alongside their regular curriculum.
I’m skeptical of this most recent claim, moving up the date of humanity’s utter irrelevance to just a couple years from now. Regardless, it’s true that much human labor is being made obsolete. And, while it’s often said that technological advances create more jobs than they destroy, previous technological advances did not have as their explicit goal making all human labor obsolete.
I’d commend Amodei for recognizing that when human labor becomes obsolete, it will be an unprecedented social nightmare, if not for the fact that he decided it was better to make money by being part of the problem. And also, it’s kind of appalling that he thinks we should wait until after the crisis has arrived to “sit down and figure it out.”
But hey, maybe it won’t matter, because the planet will be so cooked that we can’t live on it anymore.
Expressive Faces Make People More Likable
“The pattern was clear: people who were more facially expressive were more liked by others.”
I’ll end on a positive note, at least for me. The headline alone made me smile… and it was probably a very expressive one. I have a highly expressive face, so much so that I sometimes get distracted by myself in online meetings. I’ve learned to disable self-view on any videoconferencing application I’m using as a result. Meanwhile, it’s good to know that my lack of a poker face is a benefit in any other situation than card-playing.
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Semantics & So On 