June 2024

Tech Doom

AI, What a Shocker

June was a wonderful time for Microsoft, as their spyware/security risk/new ‘feature’ Recall was panned so hard in the press and social media that they delayed it indefinitely.

The fear is that Recall makes it easier for malware and attackers to steal information. InfoStealer trojans already exist to steal credentials and information from PCs, and hackers currently distribute this type of malware to steal and sell information. “Recall enables threat actors to automate scraping everything you’ve ever looked at within seconds,” says Beaumont.

Of course, AI continues to be everyone’s favorite subject, which means more and more mainstream pushback against the security implications of allowing these systems to access all your data. As part of a relevant experiment, 404 Media tried to tried to replace itself with AI with predictable but still surprising results.

The thing that continually surprises me however are the energy requirements:

In the US, power demand is expected to grow by 40% over the next two decades, compared with just 9% growth over the past 20 years, according to John Ketchum, chief executive officer at NextEra Energy Inc., the world’s biggest builder of wind and solar energy that isn’t backed by a government. Data centers are the biggest reason for that demand boom, Ketchum said, citing electrification and manufacturing as other factors. Asked why data centers were suddenly sucking up so much power, his answer was blunt: “It’s AI,” he said, citing the energy needs for training models and also the inference process by which AI draws conclusions from data it hasn’t seen before. “It’s 10 to 15 times the amount of electricity.”

At least this is just money being burned by tech companies right? Right?

The surge in data center demand, combined with heavy investments from power companies like Dominion on new substations, transmission lines and other infrastructure to support it, are also increasing the likelihood customers will see their energy prices go up, experts say. The cost of some upgrades are typically allocated among electricity customers in an entire region, showing up as a line item on everyone’s monthly utility bill.

Ah well. Wouldn’t be tech if they didn’t find some way to foist the cost on us normal folk. Which is why we’re all so pissed off about this AI nonsense. All those links are absolutely worth reading, by the way. And the cherry on top, of course, is how AI bros feel like they should be able to muscle into everything they want, but get very upset when humans outdo AI.

But the bubble is going to burst. This article on AI scaling myths highlights why the end is likely to come sooner rather than later.

Why might emergence not continue indefinitely? This gets at one of the core debates about LLM capabilities — are they capable of extrapolation or do they only learn tasks represented in the training data? The evidence is incomplete and there is a wide range of reasonable ways to interpret it. But we lean toward the skeptical view. On benchmarks designed to test the efficiency of acquiring skills to solve unseen tasks, LLMs tend to perform poorly.

People often discuss when companies will “run out” of training data. But this is not a meaningful question. There’s always more training data, but getting it will cost more and more. And now that copyright holders have wised up and want to be compensated, the cost might be especially steep. In addition to dollar costs, there could be reputational and regulatory costs because society might push back against data collection practices.

Phew.

Boeing

This month’s update on Boeing is that after families called for criminal prosecution for their part in multiple disasters, and prosecutors recommended criminal charges, to which the US DoJ decided to charge Boeing with fraud. And a late update that showed up while I was writing this: Boeing intends to plead guilty.

Of course… their problems aren’t just planes, after problems with their Starliner spacecraft stranded uh, left? two astronauts on the ISS.

Tech Genius Grab Bag

Wired’s investigation into Oceangate is an absolutely wild read. It says a lot that the only people dumb enough to ride a barely-tested sub designed by minimum wage engineering interns to the bottom of the ocean are rich people.

Climate Doom

Tech Intersection

Remember how we fixed¹ the ozone layer? Remember how SpaceX is deploying thousands of disposable satellites? Well, it turns out that when satellites burn up on re-entry, they dispers oxides into the atmosphere which are likely to ablate the ozone layer. But I guess sunburn isn’t the worst thing on the list of potential catastrophic results of this space pollution:

Even if we only induce ionospheric perturbations regionally – say, in spaceflight regions – then it could cause holes above the ozone. This in turn, could allow atmospheric stripping, which could erode our atmosphere over time and put the planet at risk of losing habitability.

Geoengineering

It’s long been known that geoengineering in one location could cause climate problems in others², but I am surprised to see mainstream reporting about it already.

A geoengineering technique designed to reduce high temperatures in California could inadvertently intensify heatwaves in Europe, according to a study that models the unintended consequences of regional tinkering with a changing climate.

This is speaking about the geoengineering I referenced last month by the way.

Extreme Weather

It won’t surprise you that brutal heat waves are drastically more likely. What might surprise you is that infrastructure is already failing and even utility companies can’t get insurance³.

At least the UN is calling on countries to support the small island nations which are bearing the leading edge of this new future.

A Wee Treat to Sustain You

Geothermal energy has made pretty big leaps and could represent a major boon to renewable power generation, which itself is generating massive secondary benefits. Meanwhile a giant electric dump truck will use the gravitational energy of its load to generate more power than it uses.

Art and photography used to change public policy, and another data point on the road to curing cancer. An app developer wrote a privacy policy for his app that does not handle any user data.