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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The AI Race: How The Surge In Data Centers Harms Us

There are more than 5,400 data centers in the United States, which is almost half of the number of data centers worldwide. In the past four years, there has been a surge in data center construction, particularly in poor communities in the South. Clearing the FOG speaks with Jai Dulani of Media Justice, who authored a new report: The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South, and Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson, about the harms that these centers are causing in local communities, particularly in their enormous consumption of water and energy, and the risk they pose to the US economy. Akuno also addresses the bigger picture of the deleterious impact of artificial intelligence on our lives.

Avoiding The AI Hypetrain

I have to admit, I do find it a bit amusing to watch someone climb onboard a hypetrain at the exact moment that said train is hurtling off a cliff. It does spoil the fun though, when that someone is an apex organization for the national coopererative movement. Unfortunately, that's what it felt like last week when I happened upon a video of NCBA CLUSA's most recent Co-op Circle Happy Hour. The topic for the event was "Cooperatives on AI, Data, and Democracy"; and the first 10 minutes consisted of a presentation by NCBA's Senior Director of Information Technology about ways that co-ops can use "AI." I put "AI" in scare-quotes because that term covers a broad range of tools that have very little, if anything, in common with each other.

Artificial Intelligence Furthers Environmental Racism In Black America

When one of my best friends (who is also a pastor) encouraged me to look into utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for ministry purposes, I was exhilarated. It seemed like a game-changer at my fingertips. I used it to make presentations and outline Bible studies, saving time on the tasks that often fill my days. The opportunities seemed endless, and the convenience was remarkable. Regular projects and tasks that I had poured effort into before could now be completed in mere seconds. Not only did I start utilizing it, but I started singing its praises as well to all who would listen.

Where Is The Artificial Intelligence Safety Movement?

Whether or not we realize it, artificial intelligence is reshaping the world with breathtaking speed. Promoted as a panacea to cure diseases, revolutionize industries and tackle the world’s most intractable problems, AI is also quietly displacing workers, amplifying biases and creating surveillance systems pervasive and pernicious enough for any dystopian. As if that weren’t enough, there’s the prospect of super intelligent AI outpacing human control altogether. So where are the humans in all this? Where are the protests, the people out on the streets, the demands for safeguards, for oversight, for input from normal people?

AI Energy Demand Can Keep Fossil Fuels Alive

Just before the November 2024 election, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released its flagship annual report on global energy markets – and the agency’s forecast suggested a new era was dawning. Over 150 years of growth in demand for fossil fuels has nearly reached its end, the IEA’s forecasts showed for a second year in a row. Fossil fuel demand will peak by the end of this decade, the organization affirmed, concluding that clean energy like wind, solar, and storage look increasingly capable of driving fossil fuels out of global energy markets – and soon.

Junk Science And Bad Policing: The Homicide Prediction Project

The law enforcement breed can be a pretty dark lot. To be paid to think suspiciously leaves its mark, fostering an incentive to identify crimes and misdemeanours with instinctive compulsion. Historically, this saw the emergence of quackery and bogus attempts to identify criminal tendencies. Craniometry and skull size was, for a time, an attractive pursuit for the aspiring crime hunter and lunatic sleuth. The crime fit the skull. With the onset of facial recognition technologies, we are seeing the same old habits appear, with their human creators struggling to identify the best means of eliminating compromising biases.

Elon Musk’s DOGE Reportedly Installed Artificial Intelligence At The EPA

Two people familiar with the use of technology by Elon Musk’s DOGE team told Reuters that the team has setup artificial intelligence to spy on employees at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The objective, according to the two media sources, is to look for “language in communications considered hostile” to Musk or President Donald Trump. “Trump-appointed officials who had taken up EPA posts told managers that DOGE was using AI to monitor communication apps and software, including Microsoft Teams, which is widely used for virtual calls and chats,” the sources additionally claimed.

State Department To Use AI To Revoke Visas Of Students Who ‘Appear Pro-Hamas’

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is launching an AI-driven effort to revoke the visas of foreigners in the US who “appear pro-Hamas” in a crackdown targeting pro-Palestine protests on college campuses, Axios reported on Thursday. The report said the effort will involve AI-assisted reviews of social media accounts of tens of thousands of foreign students in the US on visas that will look for “evidence of alleged terrorist sympathies expressed after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.” The language in the report suggests that any foreign students who attend pro-Palestine demonstrations or express sympathy for Palestinians online could be swept up in the crackdown since opponents of the Israeli siege on Gaza or US military support for Israel are often labeled “pro-Hamas.”

China’s AI Breakthroughs Show It Is Outcompeting Monopoly Capitalism

The Chinese company DeepSeek has made a major breakthrough in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), with the release of its deep learning model R1. As the Financial Times put it, “With DeepSeek, China innovates and the US imitates”. Until now, the West had deemed China incapable of innovation, and Western monopoly capitalism was considered the summit of technological development. China has quietly and gradually overcome not only crucial internal contradictions but, above all, impediments imposed by the West that sought to curb its development.

A New Military-Industrial Complex Arises

Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers — Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego — to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects.

Washington’s Fantasy Of A War Against China

The fragility of US power was clear when a small Chinese startup released the DeepSeek machine learning program. The US stock market Nasdaq shuddered, with technology stocks collapsing. This collapse is not a minor matter for the US economy. During the post-COVID-19 inflation (2021), foreign investors began to slow down their purchase of US debt. Then, after the US seized USD 600 billion in Russia’s foreign exchange assets (2022), many central banks moved their own holdings away from the long-arm jurisdiction of the United States. US Treasury bills languished.
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