The Signal to Noise Report
the "So... can we stop giving these guys money?" edition...
The Signal to Noise Report collects headlines to illustrate humanity’s move into what is beginning to resemble a hybrid species: The Jetsons meets Blade Runner. The idea being that we have a proclivity to accept (with glee) whatever new techno gizmos are shoved at us, yet rarely question their purpose and/or their long-term effects on our health and sanity.
When You Call a Restaurant, You Might Be Chatting With an AI Host
A pleasant female voice greets me over the phone. “Hi, I’m an assistant named Jasmine for Bodega,” the voice says. “How can I help?”
“Do you have patio seating,” I ask. Jasmine sounds a little sad as she tells me that unfortunately, the San Francisco–based Vietnamese restaurant doesn't have outdoor seating. But her sadness isn’t the result of her having a bad day. Rather, her tone is a feature, a setting.
Jasmine is a member of a new, growing clan: the AI voice restaurant host. If you recently called up a restaurant in New York City, Miami, Atlanta, or San Francisco, chances are you have spoken to one of Jasmine’s polite, calculated competitors.
Source: Wired
'Hunger Games' studio Lionsgate announce AI video deal
Entertainment giants Lionsgate are partnering with artificial intelligence (AI) company Runway to allow a new AI model to be trained on their extensive film and TV archive.
Lionsgate, the studios behind series such as The Hunger Games and John Wick, will benefit by being able to use the resulting AI technology in future productions.
“We're already seeing a lot of job loss in the creative industries, that is only going to get worse,” writer and producer Helen Delzany told the BBC. “But the greater tragedy in all of this is how stale film and entertainment may become.”
Actor Alexander Chard posted on X “Our words, performances, and direction are merely to feed the machine until we’re no longer needed.”
Source: BBC
Google’s emissions climb nearly 50% in five years due to AI energy demand
Google’s goal of reducing its climate footprint is in jeopardy as it relies on more and more energy-hungry data centres to power its new artificial intelligence products. The tech giant revealed Tuesday that its greenhouse gas emissions have climbed 48% over the past five years.
Google said electricity consumption by data centres and supply chain emissions were the primary cause of the increase. It also revealed in its annual environmental report that its emissions in 2023 had risen 13% compared with the previous year, hitting 14.3m metric tons.
The tech company, which has invested substantially in AI, said its “extremely ambitious” goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2030 “won’t be easy”. It said “significant uncertainty” around reaching the target included “the uncertainty around the future environmental impact of AI, which is complex and difficult to predict”.
Source: The Guardian
Constellation Energy to restart Three Mile Island nuclear plant, sell the power to Microsoft for AI
Power demand is also surging from the expansion of domestic manufacturing and the adoption of electric vehicles. Rystad Energy has forecast that data center and electric vehicles alone will add 290 terawatt hours of electricity demand by the end of the decade, equivalent to the entire consumption of the nation of Turkey.
Tech companies are hunting for nuclear power to meet that growing electricity demand while adhering to their climate goals. In March, Amazon Web Services bought a data center campus from Talen Energy that will be powered by the Susquehanna nuclear plant, also in Pennsylvania, in a first-of-its-kind deal. Oracle recently said it is designing a data center that will be powered by three small nuclear reactors.
Three Mile Island would be the second nuclear plant to restart operations in U.S. history. The Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan would be the first, with that plant expected to return to service at the end of 2025.
Source: CNBC
The crypto bros who dream of crowdfunding a new country
I watched Balaji outline his idea last autumn, at a vast conference hall on the outskirts of Amsterdam. “We start new companies like Google; we start new communities like Facebook; we start new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum; can we start new countries?” he asked, as he ambled on stage, dressed in a slightly baggy grey suit and loose tie. He looked less like a rockstar, more like a middle manager in a corporate accounts department. But don’t be fooled. Balaji is a former partner at the giant Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He has backers with deep pockets.
There is nothing new about corporations having undue influence in the affairs of nation states. The term "banana republic" derives from the fact that a US company, United Fruit, effectively ruled Guatemala for decades beginning in the 1930s. Apart from owning the majority of the land, they ran the railways, the postal service, the telegraph. When the Guatemalan government tried to push back, the CIA helped United Fruit out by instigating a coup.
But the network state movement appears to have greater ambitions still. It doesn’t just want pliant existing governments so that companies can run their own affairs. It wants to replace governments with companies.
Source: BBC
AI is helping shape the 2024 presidential race. But not in the way experts feared
With the 2024 election looming, the first since the mass popularization of generative artificial intelligence, experts feared the worst: social media flooded with AI-generated deepfakes that were so realistic, baffled voters wouldn’t know what to believe.
So far, that hasn’t happened. Instead, what voters are seeing is far more absurd: A video of former President Donald Trump riding a cat while wielding an assault rifle. A mustachioed Vice President Kamala Harris dressed in communist attire. Trump and Harris sharing a passionate embrace.
AI is playing a major role in the presidential campaign, even if the greatest fears about how it could threaten the U.S. presidential election haven’t materialized yet. Fake AI-generated images regularly ricochet around the web, but many of them are so cartoonish and absurd that even the most naïve viewer couldn’t take them seriously.
Source: ABC News
The Most Powerful Crypto Bro in Washington Has Very Weird Beliefs
The numbers boggle: A Public Citizen study last month found that crypto companies, which contributed less than $10 million to super PACs over the past two election cycles combined, have raised more than $200 million in 2024—accounting for nearly half of all corporate contributions this cycle. Most of that money has flowed into pro-crypto Fairshake, the largest corporate-backed super PAC in this election cycle (and the second-largest overall, after a pro-Trump PAC); as of Friday, Fairshake had spent $120 million on U.S. House and Senate races this year, according to an analysis by Sludge…
Armstrong is not just another tech CEO making the rounds in Washington, seeking a few regulatory advantages. While pitching crypto as a tool for economic opportunity to the rubes in Congress, he harbors radical ideas about crypto’s true purpose. He believes the United States is in “slow decline” and embraces the Network State, a cultish tech movement that ultimately seeks to end countries as we know them—to decentralize governance in the same way that crypto seeks to decentralize finance.
Source: The New Republic
And for a little relief:
Meet Chuckie…
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Ned Mudd resides in Alabama where he engages in interspecies communication, rock collecting, and frequent cloud watching. He is the author of The Adventures of Dink and DVD (a space age comedy). Some of Ned’s best friends are raccoons.
I'd heard of a couple of these; notably, that Microsoft was restarting Three-Mile Island to power their data centers.
AI is a beast whose ravenous need to consume more and more energy is matched only by its need to consume more and more of our human creativity.
Its time to get out our banjos and ride.
“Our words, performances, and direction are merely to feed the machine until we’re no longer needed.” yup, we are all dispensable.