AI Data Centers Are an Even Bigger Disaster Than Previously Thought

In August, the founder of hedge fund Praetorian Capital Harris “Kuppy” Kupperman penned an essay on the absurd finances behind AI data centers. While the tech industry has likened data centers — or more specifically, the expensive semiconductor chips that power them — as the “shovels” of the AI gold rush, Kupperman’s napkin math found that AI data centers have an impossibly short runway to achieve profitability.

In short, this is because data center components age rapidly, either made obsolete through rapid advances in technology, or broken down over years of constant, high-powered usage.

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Why these companies insist on a 72-hour work week

As the race to lead in artificial intelligence intensifies, Silicon Valley startups are promoting hardcore cultures like “996”

SAN FRANCISCO — Magnus Müller works around-the-clock, including Saturdays and Sundays. Sometimes that might mean starting at 7 a.m. until he goes to sleep at midnight or 1 a.m. The co-founder and CEO of the AI start-up Browser Use lives in a co-living space known as a “hacker house” with five others in the upscale Marina neighborhood of San Francisco. This living situation allows his team to convene around a whiteboard at 1 a.m. to work out new ideas for AI agents.

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Artificial intelligence threatening to push young people out of entry-level jobs

OTTAWA — Throughout her university career, Jacqueline Silver assumed her computer science degree would guarantee her a job. Finding out she was wrong was a demoralizing experience.

Silver, who graduated recently from McGill University and now lives in Toronto, spent more than a year applying for hundreds of jobs before finally finding one in her field this month.

“I was really exhausted, and it was also just really discouraging,” said Silver, who noted that several of her classmates have also had trouble finding work.

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AI-related data centres use vast amounts of water. But gauging how much is a murky business

On a dry, hot day this summer, Kathryn Barnwell, a retired English professor, marched up the road from her home in Nanaimo, B.C., to take another crack at the mayor.

Leonard Krog, a longtime friend of Barnwell’s, was standing by the entrance to a parched wooded lot, the proposed site for a data centre Krog has been backing.

“I really, really enjoin you to think about what this [data centre] could mean for your political career,” Barnwell said, barely looking him in the eye.

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Military drones will upend the world: The age of hyper-power is here

Political power arises from the barrel of a gun. Such, at any rate, is Mao Zedong’s most famous dictum. Accomplished poet, keen historian, and a master strategist, he was in this instance only half-right — for political power arises not only from the barrel of the gun, but from the capacity to make that gun, and to motivate those who would hold it. As a Marxist, he would have appreciated an additional observation: a gun is not only a gun. It is also a tool, a lens through which to observe the economy, society, and political implications of a moment in history. For those who care to look, today’s weapons are pointing to the future.

On the killing fields of Ukraine, an estimated 70% of casualties are now caused by drones. Tactics, techniques, and equipment are evolving at breakneck speed. At high and low altitude, cameras mounted on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provide constant surveillance, channelling data to human operators and to other drones. In battle, and in the slow attritional grind of the stable front lines, UAVs are used to hunt and bomb the enemy — pursuing individual soldiers and recording footage of their final moments. Close-range combat is disappearing, and artillery is on the way out, too. 

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One of the world’s biggest AI companies wants a deal with Canada. Is sovereignty the trade-off?

One of the world’s biggest artificial intelligence companies is knocking on Canada’s door, potentially armed with an offer that — under normal circumstances — would be hard to refuse.

OpenAI is building a global network of data centres to store the massive amounts of information collected by its services, including ChatGPT — and Canada’s cheap energy could help with that.

The company believes AI and its associated infrastructure will be the base of future economic development, and it says it wants to help spread what it calls “democratic AI.” It recently launched “OpenAI for countries” to pounce on the opportunity.


We could power AI by putting our millions of unneeded foreign workers on treadmills.

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America’s Manufacturing Resurgence Will Be Powered by These Robots

In small factories across America, agile automatons are making everything from parts for AI supercomputers to the hulls of America’s future autonomous naval weapons.
Once a luxury reserved for big manufacturers, smaller, smarter, more flexible and less expensive “cobots”—collaborative robots—are bringing automation to every fabricator, no matter the size.

These robots aren’t just nice to have. The slow, fragile recovery of American goods production wouldn’t be possible without them.

The number of U.S. companies that make physical things reached a low point in 2014 and has grown since then. Yet they are trapped in a never-ending labor shortage as skilled workers age out, and young people fail to take their place.


Robots? Who needs em’ Canada will import unskilled 3rd World labour.

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Self-Driving Cars Becoming Unstoppable

Despite union efforts to squelch this industry, Waymo and others keep proving that robots are better drivers than human beings

SACRAMENTO — After San Bruno police couldn’t figure out how to ticket a driverless taxicab that made an illegal U-turn, the Legislature passed a measure that would hold these companies responsible for the rare traffic violation. That is not only unobjectionable but signals good news. Last year, the Legislature had tried — but failed — to pass a law that would have essentially allowed localities to regulate these vehicles. That would have put the kibosh on their expansion in major metro areas if individual localities could limit or forbid them on local streets.

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New Harvest: AI, Automation, and the Displacement of College-Educated Workers

I currently volunteer a couple of days a week as a tutor for the STEM program at a local community college. I’ve also recently taken some HVAC courses.

As one of the older folks on campus, I ask questions and mostly listen, and I find students’ perspectives on AI fascinating, varied, and perhaps naive. A few admit to being active users, but the majority don’t seem to use it or even know much about it. Others are firmly against it, citing accuracy issues. Even the instructors often shake their heads, showing little confidence in it and viewing it more as a frustration they have to deal with because of students who don’t do their own work.

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The AI Employment Apocalypse Is Only a Few Years Away

Since ChatGPT’s paradigm-shifting debut in November 2022, writers and thinkers of all stripes have touted the virtues and lamented the dangers of A.I. Such dangers include A.I.’s disastrous effect on education and on creativityits potential to enable ordinary citizens to make weapons of mass destruction or to flood the world with deepfakes, its supposed tendency to reinforce stereotypes, its willingness to steal our intellectual property or its capacity to kill us off entirely.

Yet one danger of A.I. looms above all others — and we’re completely unprepared for it: the coming wave of A.I.-driven unemployment likely to hit within the next few years.

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Scientists grow mini human brains to power computers

It may have its roots in science fiction, but a small number of researchers are making real progress trying to create computers out of living cells.

Welcome to the weird world of biocomputing.

Among those leading the way are a group of scientists in Switzerland, who I went to meet.

One day, they hope we could see data centres full of “living” servers which replicate aspects of how artificial intelligence (AI) learns – and could use a fraction of the energy of current methods.


This is exactly what’s going to go wrong!

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OpenAI’s Video Generation App Sora 2 Is ‘Hollywood’s Most Terrifying Nightmare’ — Here’s Everything We Know

OpenAI’s artificial intelligence-generated video maker called “Sora 2” has launched and it is throwing Hollywood and the entertainment industry into full-blown panic with “nightmare” predictions of the looming end of the showbiz industry as we know it.

OMG.

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Artificial Intelligence Requires Human Understanding

AI does not foresee the future; it extrapolates from the past. A thriving future demands original thought that responds to the needs of the present.

As a longtime book author, lecturer, and journalist, a great part of my time is spent on research. So, the arrival of Artificial Intelligence would seem to be a great boon for my writing.

I mostly use publicly available search and AI. But in thousands and thousands of searches, I have never received a positive right-of-center response first on a search. If looking for a specific product or named person or institution the regular search can usually find it. But finding a Right-oriented article often takes multiple searches going far down the list. Often there is nothing very far Right on the list at all. For AI searches, it is rare to find a serous conservative piece anywhere.


Fear spawns visions of Skynet or a Big Brother like surveillance society created “for our safety”.

In the short term at least we proles may be the most dangerous variable.

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Walmart CEO Issues Wake-Up Call: ‘AI Is Going to Change Literally Every Job’

BENTONVILLE, Ark.—Walmart executives aren’t sugarcoating the message: Artificial intelligence will wipe out jobs and reshape its workforce.

Now the country’s largest private employer is making plans to confront that reality.

“It’s very clear that AI is going to change literally every job,” Chief Executive Doug McMillon said this week in one of the most pointed assessments to date from a big-company CEO on AI’s likely impact on employment.

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