“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

What was the true root cause of the anti-immigration riots and protests which rocked the United Kingdom last summer and have continued doing so intermittently ever since? The logical explanation could be that the native population are sick and tired of seeing their civilisation and their culture replaced by unassimilable outsiders, a feeling brought to a head by the murder of three innocent little girls in the town of Southport by a supposed ‘Welsh choirboy’ who later turned out to be a black Rwandan second-generation settler. Yet some British MPs claim to know better: the disturbances were actually caused by crude and ‘offensive’ pictures circulating on the Internet, without which nobody would ever have objected to such acts of senseless infanticide.

‘Small but mighty,’ is how Baroness Casey described Bedfordshire Police when she released her report on grooming gangs over the summer. She told MPs that most forces had failed to properly record child abuse. ‘A bloody disaster, frankly’. But Bedfordshire is different. They’re using artificial intelligence so police can spend more time hunting criminals.

‘I didn’t know about Louise Casey’s comments until you contacted us,’ says Trevor Rodenhurst, the chief constable of the county. That’s unsurprising. Rodenhurst is a busy man. We meet in his office on the outskirts of Bedford, under an official portrait of the King; behind his computer is his ceremonial tipstaff and photographs of his children.

Superintelligent AI could still kill us

Outside the AI company Anthropic’s offices in San Francisco, a guy is on a hunger strike. He’s been there two weeks. Another was doing something similar outside Google DeepMind in London, but never quite hit his straps: he started tweeting about it on the first day, which seems a grandiose way of saying “I skipped breakfast”, and then gave up after doctors told him it was dangerous — a surprise to those of us who rather thought that was the point.

Jokes aside, the intention is to stop the tech companies from building superintelligent AI, which they say “threatens to destroy life on Earth”. But here’s the thing: if these protesters believe that superintelligent AI has a high chance of killing everyone, then they’re not overreacting. If anything, they’re underreacting. Since I, too, think that there is a non-trivial chance of AI killing everyone, I should really be applauding them, not sneering.

TIRANA — Albania has become the first country in the world to have an AI minister — not a minister for AI, but a virtual minister made of pixels and code and powered by artificial intelligence.

Her name is Diella, meaning sunshine in Albanian, and she will be responsible for all public procurement, Prime Minister Edi Rama said Thursday.

WTF? h/t Mauser

Missouri senator Josh Hawley warned today that AI will create a caste system in America.

In one of his most forceful attacks yet on Silicon Valley, the Republican argued that unchecked advances in AI technology would hand unprecedented power to a small elite while hollowing out America’s working class.

In a new frontier for warfare, Ukraine is using technology to allow groups of drones to communicate and make decisions independent of their operator

On a recent evening, a trio of Ukrainian drones flew under the cover of darkness to a Russian position and decided among themselves exactly when to strike.

The assault was an example of how Ukraine is using artificial intelligence to allow groups of drones to coordinate with each other to attack Russian positions, an innovative technology that heralds the future of battle.

Military experts say the so-called swarm technology represents the next frontier for drone warfare because of its potential to allow tens or even thousands of drones—or swarms—to be deployed at once to overwhelm the defenses of a target, be that a city or an individual military asset.

Soon the local police force will have such critters. Just in case.

Years after a Tesla driver using Autopilot plowed into a young Florida couple in 2019, crucial electronic data detailing how the fatal wreck unfolded was missing. The information was key for a wrongful death case the survivor and the victim’s family were building against Tesla, but the company said it didn’t have the data.

Then a self-described hacker, enlisted by the plaintiffs to decode the contents of a chip they recovered from the vehicle, found it while sipping a Venti-size hot chocolate at a South Florida Starbucks. Tesla later said in court that it had the data on its own servers all along.

To build the energy systems needed to fuel growth, the U.S. will need to weigh choices and tradeoffs.

The adage “knowledge is power” could be recast: knowledge consumes power. Throughout history, the advance of knowledge has led to the invention of new products and services. These innovations inevitably increase energy consumption. With the invention of useful artificial intelligence (AI), we have another example of that truth.

AI-focused data centers, more than any other single factor, are driving growth in regional and national electricity demands at a rate not seen in a half-century. The boom has caused the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to more than triple its formerly tepid forecast for growth in U.S. power demand by 2030. The lower end of its growth estimate would be equivalent to adding about five times New York City’s peak power usage.

Artificial intelligence is profoundly limiting some young Americans’ employment prospects, new research shows.

Young workers are getting hit in fields where generative-AI tools such as ChatGPT can most easily automate tasks done by humans, such as software development, according to a paper released Tuesday by three Stanford University economists. They crunched anonymized data on millions of employees at tens of thousands of firms, including detailed information on workers’ ages and jobs, making this one of clearest indicators yet of AI’s disruptive impact.

“There’s a clear, evident change when you specifically look at young workers who are highly exposed to AI,” said Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who conducted the research with Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen.

Google’s YouTube has been secretly using AI to “enhance” users’ videos without their knowledge or consent, leading to a growing sense of unease among content creators.

A silent recession has arrived for recent college graduates. Over the past two years, unemployment among 22‑to-27‑year‑olds with bachelor’s degrees has climbed to levels seen during economic downturns. A college diploma used to be an ironclad job guarantee. Today it seems more like a lottery ticket with shrinking odds.

This plunge is just the beginning. As generative artificial intelligence improves, entry-level and service sector jobs may increasingly disappear, threatening not just workers but also the cities where they live. Recent research by the Brookings Institution shows how San Francisco and San Jose, Calif., New York and Washington could soon face significant job disruption, thanks to the rise of A.I. In San Jose, a striking 43 percent of workers could see A.I. transform half or more of their tasks.