SMRs Explained: Real-World Economics, Fuel Bottlenecks, and the Race to Scale
A primer on SMRs, as in small nuclear reactors, the new bright idea for how to satisfy insatiable AI energy demand.
Read more...Category Archives: Technology and innovation
Screens and Social Media Are Damaging Kids’ Conversation Skills. Here’s Why This Matters, and How to Get Them Back
Quelle surprise! Smartphone fixation is producing conversation-deficient children.
Read more...AI and Systemic Risk
The popular press is whistling past the graveyard of AI systemic risk even as heavyweight experts warn more needs to be done.
Read more...Trillions for War, Pennies for People: How Soaring Military Spending Fails Americans
Unpacking why the US military is so expensive and even if it were less pork-driven, would still be unduly costly for society at large.
Read more...Near-Term Climate News and Other Tall Tales
A new climate sighting plus AI fakery.
Read more...Some Perhaps Not Fully Anticipated Effects of Increased AI Use: Evidence Doubts, Fraud and Fraud Containment
Some important second-order effects of greater AI use, such as greater ease of perpetrating fraud and what might responses might be
Read more...These 15 Coal Plants Would Have Retired. Then Came AI and Trump.
Utilities started reversing coal power’s “irreversible” decline. Will it last?
Read more...What to Eat Now, More Than Ever
Marion Nestle has been the essential guide to our “food system” (one trillion dollars a year) in the United States for a long time. Her work is relevant in other such as the United Kingdom that lack a robust food culture, for the most part because it was killed by the food system, not because […]
Read more...Is AI Creating Monsters?
More troubling new sightings on the AI front.
Read more...Satyajit Das: AI – Artificial Intelligence or Absolute Insanity?
AI is following the same trajectory as the dot-com bubble.
Read more...How the Pandemic Accelerated the Geopolitical Breakdown
Did COVID-19 deepen the crises of capitalism and inject a sense of panic into the world’s power struggles?
Read more...Africa’s New Data Dependency – Technology Colonialism
Data agreements are replacing armies as tools of colonialism and the return of external governance
Read more...What’s at Stake in Trump’s Executive Order Aiming to Curb State-Level AI Regulation
Fortunately, an executive order won’t stop states from restricting AI. But expect the Administration to try other routes.
Read more...AI’s Errors May Be Impossible to Eliminate – What That Means for Its Use in Health Care
Even with concerns about using AI in medicine, proponents contend doctors can properly oversee its use. Is that realistic?
Read more...The U.S. Is Betting the Economy on ‘Scaling’ AI: Where Is the Intelligence When One Needs It?
A detailed discussion of how AI data-center investment boom is soking a societally and financially costly bubble
Read more...