In particular, the manufacturing of semiconductors, which underpin advanced AI hardware, is an extremely resource and energy-intensive process.

Meanwhile, nuclear energy is being touted as a solution, but it is largely a dangerous distraction. The long timelines of Small Modular Reactors and safety risks of restarting decommissioned nuclear plants, as exemplified by Microsoft’s controversial plan to reopen the Three Mile Island site, further undermine the credibility of this approach. Without addressing the escalating energy demands of AI and their contribution to the climate crisis, the promise of AI as a “climate solution” is pure fiction.

Governments must prohibit planned obsolescence and champion the right to repair. Current hardware business models encourage devices, including servers needed for AI, to break prematurely in a practice called planned obsolescence. Industry and policymakers should incentivise circularity and longevity to extend the life of existing hardware. Furthermore, the right to repair and freely modify technology products should be strengthened.

They represent the bare minimum required to mitigate the ongoing harm to our economies, societies, and shared planet.

misled investors by exploiting the promise and allure of AI technology to build a false narrative about innovation that never existed. This type of deception not only victimizes innocent investors

In truth, nate relied heavily on teams of human workers—primarily located overseas—to manually process transactions in secret, mimicking what users believed was being done by automation

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. George Bernard Shaw never said these words, but Charles F. Brannan did.

In his book The Public Domain, the copyright scholar James Boyle talks about the political salience of the term "ecology." Boyle recounts how, prior to the rise of the word "ecology," there were many standalone issues, but no movement. Sure, you care about owls, and I care about the ozone layer, but what does the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere have to do with the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians? https://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf The term "ecology" welded all these thousands of issues together into a movement. When I look at the incredible, organic, bottom-up surge of antitrust energy, the only explanation I can find is that something similar is happening here. Concentrated corporate power is the common enemy of beer drinkers, surgeons, shippers, patients, farmers, grocery shoppers, social media users, any anyone who wears sneakers: https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

As the introduction has already shown, in our current system this makes total sense: Because you need to become the one company for a thing. The central social media platform, the shopping platform, the whatever. Even startups adopt the practices and methods of bigger cooperation – because that’s their aspiration: Becoming the next Goomazonbook.

Some of you might have heard the phrase “corporations don’t want to make money, they want to make all the money” (I think I heard it first from James Stephanie Sterling talking about video game publishers).

A gyrotron uses high-power, linear-beam vacuum tubes to generate millimeter-length electromagnetic waves. Invented by Soviet scientists in the 1960s, gyrotrons are used in nuclear fusion research experiments to heat and control plasma. Quaise has raised $95 million from investors, including Japan’s Mitsubishi, to develop technology that would enable it to quickly and efficiently drill up to 20 km deep, closer to the Earth’s core than ever before

Oh, compliance moats are definitely real – think of the calls for AI companies to license their training data. AI companies can easily do this – they'll just buy training data from giant media companies – the very same companies that hope to use models to replace creative workers with algorithms. Create a new copyright over training data won't eliminate AI – it'll just confine AI to the largest, best capitalized companies, who will gladly provide tools to corporations hoping to fire their workforces: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids