Dr Joanna Boehnert

Last week, we launched the world's ultimate guide to climate solutions -- the Drawdown Explorer.

People thought we were nuts to give it (and all the underlying data) away for free. But we insisted.

During a crisis, you don't put crucial data behind a paywall.

Current market priorities in higher education require people who do not know how the world works.

✅ Worked against AI.

Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be? The entire U.S. economy is being propped up by the promise of productivity gains that seem very far from materializing. By Rogé Karma

The capability-reliability gap might explain why generative AI has so far failed to deliver tangible results for businesses that use it. When researchers at MIT recently tracked the results of 300 publicly disclosed AI initiatives, they found that 95 percent of projects failed to deliver any boost to profits. A March report from McKinsey & Company found that 71 percent of companies reported using generative AI, and more than 80 percent of them reported that the technology had no “tangible impact” on earnings. In light of these trends, Gartner, a tech-consulting firm, recently declared that AI has entered the “trough of disillusionment” phase of technological development.

By one estimate, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Tesla will by the end of this year have collectively spent $560 billion on AI-related capital expenditures since the beginning of 2024 and have brought in just $35 billion in AI-related revenue. OpenAI and Anthropic are bringing in lots of revenue and are growing fast, but they are still nowhere near profitable. Their valuations—roughly $300 billion and $183 billion, respectively, and rising—are many multiples higher than their current revenues. (OpenAI projects about $13 billion in revenues this year; Anthropic, $2 billion to $4 billion.) Investors are betting heavily on the prospect that all of this spending will soon generate record-breaking profits. If that belief collapses, however, investors might start to sell en masse, causing the market to experience a large and painful correction.

The dot-com crash was bad, but it did not trigger a crisis. An AI-bubble crash could be different. AI-related investments have already surpassed the level that telecom hit at the peak of the dot-com boom as a share of the economy. In the first half of this year, business spending on AI added more to GDP growth than all consumer spending combined. Many experts believe that a major reason the U.S. economy has been able to weather tariffs and mass deportations without a recession is because all of this AI spending is acting, in the words of one economist, as a “massive private sector stimulus program.” An AI crash could lead broadly to less spending, fewer jobs, and slower growth, potentially dragging the economy into a recession. The economist Noah Smith argues that it could even lead to a financial crisis if the unregulated “private credit” loans funding much of the industry’s expansion all go bust at once.

It's seeming likelier and likelier that AI really could eliminate a lot of jobs very soon. Just not in the way boosters have suggested. www.theatlantic.com/economy/arch...

Single frame. Image: horizon line, river of red flows from left to right; PM Albanese stands beside looking. Text from above left: “The 1948 UN Genocide Convention, adopted in the wake of the mass murder of Jews by Nazi Germany, requires all countries to act to prevent and stop genocide. The world’s biggest academic association of genocide scholars has passed a resolution, with 86% declaring Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza to be genocide. Where is our red line?”

Red line.
My @smh @theage cartoon.

“AI’s environmental footprint does not happen one prompt at a time. By making the calculation as if it did, the number hides the fact that Google and its peers are building an entirely new digital infrastructure at a massive scale”

Director of European Transport Safety Council: "Europe now risks being flooded with oversized, under-regulated US pick-up trucks and SUVs – heavier, more dangerous to other car drivers, pedestrians and cyclists, and completely out of step with Europe’s vision for safer, more sustainable mobility.”

Europe and Canada, please team up and declare war on Silicon Valley 🙏

Why Saying “AI Uses the Energy of Nine Seconds of Television” is Like Spraying Dispersant Over an… TLDR: the smaller the number, the more you should be worried

Google's claim that each AI prompt uses the energy of 9 seconds of television is like throwing dispersant over an oil slick.

The only way to get a number that low is with massive scale, which you should definitely worry about. medium.com/@dnafus/why-...

The AI age is the "age of no consent" "Inevitability" means design decisions are no longer informed by user needs; now they are unilaterally imposed. The users are the ones being designed.

Users hate AI. So tech made it mandatory. Even if you don't use it, it pollutes what you read and how systems make decisions. The computer's hallucinated word is final.

And it needs all of your data to do it.

In the age of no consent, UX exists to normalized complete acquiescence to surveillance:

Why Meta’s Hyperion Data Center Looks Like It’s Crushing New York City A graphic for the tech company’s 5-gigawatt data center in rural Louisiana uses a futurist visual of Manhattan for a powerful metaphor.

“Meta means for Hyperion to dominate the landscape, culturally, economically + metaphorically. The use of a literal landscape to convey this message is no accident, and specifically NYC — far from where the demand for energy to fuel AI is remaking whole communities — is pointed.”

It’s pretty simple:

- AI is driving electricity demand up

- The Trump Administration is restricting new electricity supply from being built

- When demand goes up and supply goes down, you pay more for electricity.

Concerns about the far right should also be concerns about mainstream politicians and media as they have played a key part in making the far right the threat it is today despite pretending to be bulwarks

You can't defeat the far right without changing a system that uses it as a distraction

In London too, by the train stations.

This is why everything is "software as a service" now: you can lock you customers in on long term contracts billed per seat, rather than having to make a good product that people like to use

Not just Canada:

"In other words, if the United States were to issue a legal request to Microsoft for the data of a French citizen hosted in the EU, Microsoft would comply regardless of French or EU law."

Commentary: Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash The AI frenzy has been fueled by relentless hype, but the dud launched by OpenAI has its former enthusiasts wondering if they've been taken.

So the AI bubble was all just a hallucination, but it turns out it was the humans hallucinating, not the robots... 😬
www.latimes.com/business/sto...

GPTesus take the wheel

All historians should read this jaw dropping interview as a case study in moral and political decrepitude. Evidence if any more were needed that the accrual of massive amounts of evidence about the past does not automatically engender a critical reflection on the present.

I mean, they are singing from the same sheet of music in a way - shareholders. If the big whale shareholders have decided LLMs are over, CEOs will change their tune very quickly.

My contention about a hot civil war is that we have been living in one for decades at this point, I would say since 1982, but very slow moving. What do you think all those mass shootings are actually about? Look who is mostly perpetuating them (white males) and what they target (public institutions)

I’m so sorry 😞 I wonder if collective resources like this could be any help? against-a-i.com

AI slop steals from human artists and writers to enrich the billionaires that fund fascism. You will not defeat fascism by posting pictures made on the fascist billionaires' energy and water guzzling plagiarism extruder.

“energy and water guzzling plagiarism extruder” I like that definition a lot.

Just think - if one million people turned off their wifi for one hour it would save enough electricity to run one ChatGPT data center for ten seconds

YouTube video by Nate Pommer MONKEY VS. ROBOT!!

Monkey vs Robot youtu.be/k1Csif5l_6c?...

Simulacra and Simulation - Wikipedia

Perhaps this theory helps en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulac...

Kamala Harris should absolutely not be allowed to talk about broken political systems as if she was not recently one of the most powerful ppl win the world.

American fascism emerges from a context where the most powerful people in America don’t care enough about democracy to fight for it.

Yes ok she acknowledges the obvious - but now is not the time to sit out and wait for someone else to sort this out. Tragically, she will go down in history as a facilitator of the end of democracy in the USA and an enabler of fascism. She could be accountable, take responsibility, and fight back.