gerrymcgovern

gerrymcgovern , 1 hour ago to random

Modern AI is advertising. It is born out of the great advertising minds in Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Advertising has always been fake news. Advertising has always been about lying and targeting vulnerable, poorer people, and/or the vulnerabilities in all of us. Advertising is constantly probing for our weaknesses. As one marketer boasted to me: “The best marketing is when I make you buy something and you don’t even know why.”

gerrymcgovern , 8 hours ago to random

95% of the world’s land could become degraded by 2050. The UN says that 40% is already degraded.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c977r51e1z0o

"52% of our soil is already degraded. In a grim look to the future, projections suggest that degradation levels could rise to 90% by 2050 if we do not act immediately. The impacts of this would be devastating. Degraded soils cannot function in the same way healthy soils do: they cannot grow our food, filter our water, and clean our air.”
https://earth.org/why-2024-is-a-pivotal-year-for-our-soil/

gerrymcgovern , 1 day ago to random

"You might ask how AI generates something so completely bananas. It’s because AI can’t tell the difference between true and false. Instead, a complex computer program plays probabilistic language guessing games, betting on what words are most likely to follow other words. If an AI program hasn’t been trained on a subject — unusual last names, for instance — it can conjure up authoritative-seeming but false verbiage."

https://kansasreflector.com/2024/06/22/artificial-intelligence-has-spread-lies-about-my-good-name-and-im-here-to-settle-the-score/

gerrymcgovern , 2 days ago to random

"It may come as a shock to learn that an exhaustive survey of various studies, published by the journal Patterns, examined the behavior of various types of AI and alarmingly concluded that yes, in fact, AI systems are intentionally deceitful and will stop at nothing to achieve their objectives."

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-ai-lies-cheats-and-grovels-to-succeed-and-what-we-need-to-do-about-it/

gerrymcgovern , 3 days ago to random

"A renewable energy company will soon begin clearing thousands of protected Joshua trees just outside this desert town, including many thought to be a century old, to make way for a sprawling solar project that will generate power for 180,000 homes in wealthier coastal neighborhoods."

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-05-31/solar-project-to-destroy-thousands-of-joshua-trees

Don't worry, it's just trees.

Weren't we supposed to be saving trees?

To save trees you have to kill trees.

After all, we can't have the Green Transition without Green Sacrifice Zones

gerrymcgovern , 7 days ago to random

"Just last week, we reported on an article in Wired that claims nearly half of all renewable energy is being used to power data centers. It isn’t powering schools or hospitals or disadvantaged neighborhoods. It is being used to make more money for Google, X, Amazon, and Facebook."

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/06/14/concerned-citizens-seek-transparency-about-data-centers-in-virginia/

gerrymcgovern , 10 days ago to random

• Billionaires are responsible for a million times more CO2 than normal person
• 125 ultra-wealthy individuals emit more CO2 than 85 million.
• Bill Gates belches almost 7,500 tonnes of CO2 per year.
• 80 million cause more CO2 than the poorest 5 billion people.
• The top 1% are responsible for more environmental damage than the poorest 50%
• Top 1% get about 40% of all new wealth created. Poorest 50% get 2%.

gerrymcgovern , 12 days ago to random

ChatGPT is "better understood as bullshit: the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. We distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

gerrymcgovern , 13 days ago to random

"A company that adopts generative AI for something where they used to use more traditional optimization methods is probably using 10 to 20 times more carbon to do that, so if improvements aren't made, you're talking doubling or more in a five-year period in terms of the carbon footprint of the information technology that we do."

Big data centers that places like OpenAI are planning to build are gigawatt-scale data centers. That is as much energy as medium-sized cities.

https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/sustainable-computing-in-the-new-world-of-ai

gerrymcgovern , 18 days ago to random

62 million tons. This is the volume of “e-waste” – generated worldwide in 2022. It is up 82% since 2010.

Having long gone to Asia, e-waste from Europe and the US is arriving in huge quantities in West Africa ports, in violation of international treaties. Ghana has seen the proliferation of informal open-air landfill sites that have come even closer to people’s homes after the dismantling of the massive Agbogbloshie scrapyard site in July 2021.

https://africanarguments.org/2024/06/photo-essay-tracing-the-secret-complex-life-of-e-waste-in-ghana/

gerrymcgovern , 19 days ago to random

The Hunter-Gatherers spent 80% of their time gathering plants and herbs. So, why don’t we call them Gatherer-Hunters? Oh, I know. Because that would hurt the snowflake egos of men, who like to see themselves as Great Hunters. Even though, often, it was the women who did the hunting as well. Us poor men can never catch a break in this woke culture. Never mind, some tech bros have invented The Great Big Lying Machine to fix reality for us.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/07/01/1184749528/men-are-hunters-women-are-gatherers-that-was-the-assumption-a-new-study-upends-i

gerrymcgovern , 21 days ago to random

As if Microsoft isn't doing enough damage to the environment, Windows 10 support ending could be an environmental disaster that puts 240 million PCs on the scrapheap

Microsoft needs to rethink Windows 10 support deadline, analyst firm warns

https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/windows-10-support-ending-could-be-an-environmental-disaster-that-puts-240-million-pcs-on-the-scrapheap

How greedy can you get, Microsoft?

gerrymcgovern , 25 days ago to random

"The Jaw-dropping environmental impact of Large-Language-Models (LLMs). Assuming static usage of 100 million weekly active users (ex. OpenAI chatGPT) and just 5 queries per user per week, the total energy consumption for operating an LLM like GPT-3.5 is staggering—around 44,200 MWh per year."

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kaushlendratrivedi_digitalsustainability-ai-climatechange-activity-7197497699351302144-tZYn?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

gerrymcgovern , 26 days ago to random

Since 1970, there has been a:

49% decline in marine life

50% decline in insects

66% decline in wildlife

69% decline in vertebrates

83% decline in freshwater species

Birds: 60% decline in Ireland in 50 years

Lions: 90% decline in Ghana in 40 years

Forest elephant: 60% decline in 12 years

Leatherback turtle: 95% decline in 20 years

SEI whale: 50% decline in 20 years (47 left)

Earthworms: 33% decline in UK in 20 years

Mammals:

3% wildlife

97% humans and livestock

Is this progress?

gerrymcgovern , 26 days ago to random

So, this guy takes out his new AI phone from Samsung and takes a photo of the table we're sitting at. Then he does some magic stuff with his AI and shows me the picture.

"Look," he says to me. "There are three glasses on the table and in the picture there are five. Isn't AI amazing!" And he laughed.

And all I could think was that this is happening in millions of places every minute of the day. All this energy. All this water. All these materials.

Destroying our environment for this?