Category Archives: Web Article Review

The AI-energy demand feedback loop

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I’ve been thinking about the idea that the massive data center expansion needed to drive the current AI boom is increasing energy demand, and in the near to medium term may be limited by energy supply. It is also apparently competing for the energy supply we have currently, driving up prices for consumers and businesses across the board, along with toxic air pollution and greenhouse gas pollution. The big technology companies are trying to tell a story that this short term pain will go away when AI “solves climate change” with its superior intelligence. That seems like a longer-term thing that will not solve our short term issues, although the tech-bro-cracy will tell us we are just not smart enough to think exponentially like them, and what we think is long term is in fact just around the corner.

I’ve been thinking about the Kardashev Scale. This is the idea that the level of sophistication of a civilization can be linked to the amount of energy it uses – just the energy striking the surface of the planet, all the energy of its star, all the energy of all the stars in its galaxy, etc. (we are just off the left end, trying to get onto this scale). This might seem not to square with the idea that more energy use means more pollution, negative health and environmental impacts for us at our current level of technology. The way you square that logically is to say that we have to get over the hump from dirty to clean energy technology before we can take the next step to a higher order of civilization. If AI can increase our rate of scientific and technology advancement, maybe it can help us get there sooner. Currently we are at the stage where we are turning decommissioned coal plants back on to fuel the AI, without seeing any measurable benefits so far. Realists/cynics (don’t cynics always consider themselves realists?) might also point out that there is a lot of friction built into human institutions and sociopolitical systems, and that this tends to set a speed limit on the rate we can progress, even if the state of science and technology could allow us to progress faster.

One thing I always wondered was what came first – the coal chicken or the steam engine egg? It turns out, this is a true chicken and egg story that went something like this (citation: Gemini for the background, not fact checked – the words are from my human brain):

  • The ancient Romans, Chinese, and other cultures were aware of coal and burned it to heat buildings. There isn’t really a record of when it was “discovered”, you can imagine deposits of it were first found just lying around on or very near the surface, and people found it burned hotter and longer than wood.
  • By the 1700-1800s, London grew to the point that England started to run out of accessible coal to heat all the buildings. They were digging deeper and deeper to get at the coal, and starting to hit the water table. So the first steam engine was invented in 1712 to power pumps to lower the groundwater table in coal mines. This was a dirty, inefficient machine but they didn’t care because it was literally at the mine.
  • From there, the steam engine technology was refined (famously by James Watt in the 1760s) and gave rise to railroads and steam ships (both of which could move coal), and coal-powered factories. From there, the feedback loop of economic growth and energy demand (and localized toxic air pollution and global greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention labor exploitation and industrial war) took off.

So an analogous process today, we might want to think, is that the sharp increase in energy demand for the data centers will incentivize innovation around clean energy, or at least cheaper energy than what fossil fuels are currently providing. Fossil fuels seem to be pretty close to the limit of how much power they can reasonably supply our civilization, both economically and in terms of pollution we are willing to tolerate. It is almost an iron law of economics that this will fuel innovation. So AI is on the energy demand side of the equation – there is no requirement that it also has to be on the innovation side of the equation because humans are doing pretty well advancing clean energy technology (contrary to the fossil fuel industry-funded propaganda we are being force-fed in the U.S.). But humans will figure out ways to use the AI technology to innovate, and at some point maybe AI will be able to do some innovation on its own with high-level human oversight. It will make a big difference whether this process takes years or decades to unfold (I am not buying the “months” time frame being pushed by the tech-bro-cracy). If it’s decades, the ecological impacts and human suffering are going to be enormous.

What kinds of technologies could possibly be boosted by AI? This is just me brain storming:

  • Somewhat obviously, we can continue refining/scaling up the solar, wind, and battery technology we have today. Electrification of buildings, industry, and transportation are important here too, and a smarter/more resilient electric grid is also a big part of this equation. Scaling these involves the high-friction human institution-mediated processes where AI can probably point out how we can do things more rationally and efficiently, but our human inefficiency and irrationality are going to limit the pace for the foreseeable future. AI can probably design much better institutions for us, but we would have to come to some consensus and then successfully implement them. This may happen very slowly – but I see this taking decades for sure, and not much AI will be able to do about it.
  • Fusion – Let’s try to pick up the pace of basic research leading to safe commercialization.
  • Fission – I don’t think we should give up on it. The small modular reactors seem to hold out some promise even if there is also a certain amount of industry exaggeration. There is also a big push-pull between industry, government regulation, and public acceptance, and I am not sure this is something we want to speed up. It may need to just take its course to find solutions we agree are both effective and safe enough – again, decades. If we actually get fusion figured out, maybe this technology will be obsolete before it can be scaled.
  • Space-based solar technology – The energy from just our one Sun is unlimited in any practical near-term sense. There must be lots of technical problems to be worked out here – straightforward mechanical/electrical/chemical engineering stuff. Let’s get to it! The private sector may actually take care of this one without much prompting. No, I don’t want to make Elon Musk even richer, but he is a leader on this so how about some real competition. Even if a few people get unreasonably rich, there are plenty of policy options to share the wealth. AI can easily point these out for us, but again this is one of those human socio-political institutional friction areas where any progress at all is going to be painfully slow, even if we can reverse current trends and get it moving back in the right direction.
  • Applied research on energy storage, materials science, etc – there are plenty of ideas for storing energy beyond our current battery technologies. You can simply pump water up a hill while the sun is out and let it flow back down, turning a turbine when the sun goes in. You can take advantage of pressure/temperature/salinity gradients in the ocean, or electrolyze water to charge hydrogen fuel cells, just to name a few. Intelligent AIs should be able to work on problems involving materials and chemicals, first using numerical (differential equation based) simulations, and later bringing robots in real laboratories into the mix to test out the most promising ideas.
  • Fundamental research to unlock the things we can’t even think of yet – Physicists are forever searching for the holy grail of understanding gravity, relativity, quantum physics, dark matter, and probably other things I have not heard of. I have heard some of them say that new branches of mathematics may need to be invented (discovered? a philosophical question) before the right questions can even be asked. Then new instruments to collect new forms of data may need to be invented before experiments can even be designed to begin answering the new questions. This seems like an area where if AIs are eventually as capable as a leading human physicist, you can have a team of a million or billion or trillion leading physicists working on a problem 24 hours a day, without ever getting tired. One tiny little detail – we need ethical frameworks and nation-state regulations and enforceable international agreements to control the dangerous stuff that could result.

what’s going on with smart glasses?

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Real augmented reality is one of those technologies that always seems around the corner but never seems to quite arrive, at least in a widespread commercial way. It just seems silly that we are still walking around looking at these tiny screens as they give us data about our surrounding environment. I thought this would be built into car windshields by now, and at some point glasses/goggles/visors of some sort.

This article in futurism.com about Meta’s entry is negative, focusing on potential privacy risks. And of course those do exist. But the technology itself is neutral in my view. Sure, ICE can use it to track me down and beat me if they want to. I can also use it to follow directions without tripping and falling in a hole or wandering in front of a bus. It could be really useful for tourism, understanding the past history or possible future of whatever place you happen to be at this point in time. If it is eventually deployed on all or most human-operated vehicles, I really think it could control intersections much better than the antiquated stoplights and pedestrian signals that haven’t improved much over the last century.

The article suggests that Meta’s smart glasses are widely commercially deployed and that people like them. If this is the case, I simply hadn’t noticed. If it is being marketed to me at all, I hadn’t noticed. Maybe it is just deployed in California or geographic pockets other than where I am.

lies, lies, and more lies to the U.S. public about greenhouse gas emissions

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The “endangerment finding” through the Clean Air Act may not have been the ideal way to incentivize clean energy technology in our country. But it was one dial we had to turn, and now it has been turned back. This is just a temporary giveaway to the short-term interests of corporate donors in the automobile and fossil fuel industries. In the case of the auto industry, it is not in their long term interests to subsidize inefficient outdated technology, then use propaganda to swindle the public. The lie about “affordability” is particularly egregious.

Affordable vehicle ownership is essential to the American Dream and a primary driver of economic mobility out of poverty in the United States. The Endangerment Finding led to vehicle and engine regulations with an aggregate cost of more than $1 trillion and played a significant role in EPA’s justification of regulations of other sources beyond cars and trucks, resulting in additional costly burdens on American families and businesses. Americans rely on vehicles to reach jobs, education, health care, and essential services. This is especially true in rural areas and regions without robust public transit. The costs imposed by these climate policies have placed new cars out of reach for many American families and harmed Americans’ ability to climb out of poverty or reach essential services. The Trump EPA is expected to deliver Americans over $1.3 trillion in cost savings, which includes reduced costs for new vehicles and avoided costs of purchasing equipment related to EVs. This action will result in an average cost savings of over $2,400 per vehicle. By lowering vehicle and regulatory compliance costs, EPA is improving affordability and expanding consumer choice and ultimately advancing the American Dream by making it easier to reach jobs, grow small businesses, and participate fully in the transportation and logistics systems that power the U.S. economy.

Here is what Gemini has to say about this. And the analysis below is true in the United States. In China, most new vehicles being sold are electric and you can buy one for $10,000. We are being lied to, and as we have withdrawn even more from the world, we are even less aware what is going on elsewhere, but still U.S. consumers are intelligent enough that we will catch on even if there is some delay. Our legacy auto companies will fail again and again, and eventually need to be bailed out again and again, until eventually the economics of electrification is just too obvious to lie about and get away with it.

While the sticker price of an EV is typically higher, the savings in fuel and maintenance usually “pay back” that difference within 3 to 7 years. By the time a car reaches the end of its life, an EV owner in the U.S. has typically saved between $6,000 and $11,000 compared to a gas-car owner. [generated by Gemini]

There’s another sleight of hand. There is rock solid scientific and economic work showing the costs of air pollution, and here I am talking about good old fashioned toxic smoke from factories and tail pipes. There is also solid (but controversial) economic work over decades quantifying the economic value that people place on a year of worker life. For example, a construction worker on a roof might get paid more than one doing the same job on the ground, because there is a greater statistical risk of death on the roof. Aggregate these numbers over many workers, jobs, and time, and you can say the “value of a statistical life” is a certain number of dollars. It seems cold, but it provides a sound data point when a new regulation with some cost is being considered. Put these two things together and you have the scientific and economic basis to compare the costs and benefits of a policy decision. This is old school environmental economics and really a basis for some pretty conservative policy because you are acknowledging it may be rational to sacrifice some human health and life for economic production. And we are not really assigning the environment any intrinsic value in this equation, unless knowing the environment is a little better brings people some pleasure which some value can be placed on, which economists sometimes try. Of course, real world policy decisions are some combination of science, economics, and politics, as they probably should be in a democracy. But what the EPA has recently suggested it is prepared to do is set the value of a statistical life to zero when analyzing costs and benefits of air pollution. [See pp. 214-217 of the document I link to above. I acknowledge this not a crystal clear policy directive, then again, it may be intentionally buried to try to avoid scrutiny, when in fact if you dig deeper EPA is departing from official directives of the federal government, including the President’s own Office of Management and Budget.] In other words, they propose to assume the cost of pollution is zero. This is wrong, fake, naked propaganda! Their policies are killing us AND stealing our money. It is time to get rid of these immoral people claiming to lead us.

Woody Guthrie vs. Old Man Trump

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Donald Trump’s father was Woodie Guthrie’s landlord at one point. Woodie Guthrie had things to say about that, which he wrote down, such as

Beach Haven ain’t my home!
I just cain’t pay this rent!
My money’s down the drain!
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!

The U.S. government rewarded landlords for being racist at the time, but even considering that, Trump just sounds particularly vicious and racist. It’s also a data point showing that Donald J. Trump grew up in a family where openly racist views would have been expressed frequently and without remorse.

American Life Expectancy

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This article from something called the Institute for New Economic Thinking has some depressing info (not many stats though) on U.S. life expectancy. I’ve had this feeling for a few years now, that the U.S. is not only not the leader of the pack when it comes to developed nations, we are not even solidly in the middle of the pack, and we are slipping to developing country status on many indicators. But even saying that is not entirely fair to developing countries, because they are making gains on many quality of life measures out of proportion to their income levels, while we are losing quality of life in spite of our nominally growing economy.

That’s what public health researcher Steven H. Woolf, professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, has documented. By 2019, just before COVID‑19 hit, U.S. life expectancy ranked 40th among the world’s most populous countries, trailing places like Albania and Lebanon. The pandemic only made things worse: by 2020, the U.S. had fallen to 46th, as six more nations overtook it.

Woolf hasn’t just compared the U.S. to wealthy countries like Canada, Germany, or the U.K. He looked at life expectancy across dozens of nations with very different histories and economies, and the results are startling. The U.S. began falling behind as early as the 1950s, with countries in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East steadily overtaking it.

The reasons are not really secret: our lack of a universal health care system, our food system and lack of physical activity, our motor vehicle dominated lives, and our unusual level of deadly violence. There are many examples of effective policies to address these issues if our leaders choose to look to other developed and middle income countries, and even to pockets of sanity in some U.S. states and cities.

Seinfeld’s keys to success

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In this Open Culture article, Jerry Seinfeld describes three keys to success as “Transcendental meditation, lift weights, espresso.” Compare this to my “four keys to happiness in the moment”: sleep, coffee, exercise, and down time. I am not claiming my keys will work for everyone or that, obviously, I am as successful as Jerry Seinfeld.

German Rearmament

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We seem to live in a world where Germany and Japan are rearming, and most people are cheering. I generally would consider this okay myself – these are large, rich, powerful democratic countries that should be able to defend themselves and we would hope, support their democratic neighbors. This Foreign Affairs article paints a darker picture of a Germany that rearms in the face of a (perceived?) Russian threat, and then is taken over by a right-wing government.

A militarily dominant Germany could prove particularly dangerous if its centrist domestic leadership starts to lose power—as it just well might. The country is not due to hold national elections for three more years, but the extremist AfD now polls in first place at the national level. It subscribes to a far-right, illiberal, and Euroskeptic ideology. It is Russia-friendly, opposed to supporting Ukraine, and wants to reverse Germany’s post-1945 economic and military integration into the EU and NATO, at least in their current form. It sees military power as a tool of national aggrandizement that should be used exclusively to benefit Berlin. It hopes to develop a German defense industry that’s entirely autonomous from those of Berlin’s traditional allies. If it wins federal power, the AfD will use the German military exactly as Thatcher feared: to project power against Germany’s neighbors. In the same way that Washington has made once inconceivable claims on Canada and Greenland, an AfD-led Germany might eventually make claims on French or Polish territory.

It still seems far-fetched to me, but I could easily go back five years and name a bunch of things I thought were far-fetched, which have come to pass.

I have been thinking that terms like “right wing” and “fascist” are not very precise or helpful. What we see all over the world are political movements focused on ethnic nationalism. Ethnic nationalism pairs well with cultural conservatism and is more or less independent of economic ideology. Advancing the ethnic nationalist project is helped by being anti-democratic, anti-immigrant, and focused on external threats. This is the trend we are seeing in the U.S. and Europe, fueled by immigration pressure brought on by climate change, which is only going to intensify.

Can the U.S. executive branch legally withdraw from a treaty ratified by Congress?

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The Trump administration has announced that the U.S. intends to withdraw from the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. I think this is awful, as I naively thought that a treaty being “ratified” by Congress and signed by the President meant that the legislative and executive branches had come to a consensus on adopting it, and therefore a consensus would be needed to break it. By contrast, recent agreements including the Paris agreement were signed only by the executive branch. Here is what a site called Just Security (which I know nothing about) has to say.

As a matter of domestic law, the mainstream legal view, as taken in the Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law, is that the president may constitutionally withdraw the United States from a Senate-approved treaty where, as here, the withdrawal is lawful under international law and neither the Senate’s resolution of advice and consent nor a congressional law has put limits on withdrawal. The president’s power to do so has never been definitively resolved by the courts. In the 1979 case of Goldwater v. Carter (which involved President Jimmy Carter’s termination of a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan), a fractured Supreme Court declined to address this issue. In practice, however, presidents have exercised this unilateral withdrawal power, especially in the years since Goldwater.

Theoretically, it sounds like the Senate could try to insert language saying a President cannot unilaterally break a treaty. But there is really no protection. A treaty is a weaker agreement than I thought, and in recent decades Congress has not even been participating in the process of discussing and signing them. Other countries really cannot rely on the U.S. to honor any agreement from one four-year political administration to the next.

Here is what the Constitution actually says:

He [i.e. the President, whom the Founding Father-Gods assume in 1783 shall henceforth be male] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur

Too bad it doesn’t say “make, break or modify”, but it doesn’t. Perhaps we need some more practical mechanism for modernizing our outdated constitution. But those rules would have to be updated in…the Constitution.

mirror life

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The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved their Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. The clock itself, like a lot of aggregate indices (I’m talking to you ASCE infrastructure report card) is more or less a gimmick to get public and media attention, in the hopes that at least some influential people will dig into the underlying analysis and data. Their underlying analysis includes all the things you would expect: nuclear arms control lapses and reversals, direct and indirect military conflict between nuclear-armed powers, apathy and intentional reversal on addressing climate change, biological and AI weapons of mass destruction (including AI-developed biological weapons of mass destruction, which is a particularly chilling thought), and the rise of “nationalistic autocracy”, which makes all of these conflicts more likely and any cooperation to solve international problems less likely.

Completely new to me was the idea of “mirror life”. This sounds like a kind of biological gray goo, and I wonder how it could have snuck up on me unawares?

In December 2024, scientists from nine countries announced the recognition of a potentially existential threat to all life on Earth: the laboratory synthesis of so-called “mirror life.” Those scientists urged that mirror bacteria and other mirror cells—composed of chemically-synthesized molecules that are mirror-images of those found on Earth, much as a left hand mirrors a right hand—not be created, because a self-replicating mirror cell could plausibly evade normal controls on growth, spread throughout all ecosystems, and eventually cause the widespread death of humans, other animals, and plants, potentially disrupting all life on Earth. So far, however, the international community has not arrived at a plan to address this risk.

Here is Eric Drexler’s original concept of gray goo from Engines of Creation (easily on my must read list), via Wikipedia:

Early assembler-based replicators could beat the most advanced modern organisms. ‘Plants’ with ‘leaves’ no more efficient than today’s solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough, omnivorous ‘bacteria’ could out-compete real bacteria: they could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop — at least if we made no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.

Is China going through an economic slump or a second industrial revolution?

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The rate of GDP growth in China is slowing, and prices for consumer goods are dropping. This article from Warwick Powell argues that the situation is not an economic problem at all, but rather caused by a sudden acceleration of productivity analogous to a period of rapid industrial progress in the west from about 1870 to 1890.

The period from roughly 1870 to 1890 in the industrialising world is often called the Great Deflation because consumer and producer prices fell steadily for nearly two decades. Yet this was simultaneously a period of rapid industrial expansion: steelmaking, railways, shipbuilding, chemicals, and textiles all experienced extraordinary increases in output, fixed capital formation, and labour productivity. Real wages also rose, even as nominal prices and, in some cases, nominal wages remained flat or declined. Conventional monetary interpretations – where deflation is associated with falling demand, recession and financial stress – don’t explain this apparent contradiction.

The key is that this deflation was supply-led. Massive technological change (Bessemer steel, open-hearth furnaces, mechanised weaving and rail distribution networks), dramatic extensions of energy inputs (coal and steam), and economies of scale fundamentally changed production cost structures. Unit costs fell faster than aggregate demand could absorb the increased output. Prices therefore declined not because the economy was weak, but because the production system became structurally more efficient. This is what we could call “good deflation.” An excellent paper by Borio et al., (2015) explores this in more detail…

China’s current economic conditions – marked by soft consumer prices, prolonged factory-gate deflation and extraordinary expansion in clean-energy and advanced-manufacturing output – mirror the paradox of the Great Deflation of 1870–1890. Then, as now, falling prices were not signs of contraction, but the surface expression of deep productivity shifts and sectoral transformation. China today is experiencing a similar structural reconfiguration.

In our high school (U.S.) history classes, we tend to learn that the late 19th century was a time of rapid technological and industrial progress, but that was also coupled with rapidly growing inequality, labor unrest, and unregulated pollution. Maybe China’s system and leaders will be able to reap the benefits of progress while keeping these problems under control. My thinking is authoritarian political and economic systems can appear to work better than democratic capitalist systems when they have leadership in place that is rational and genuinely has the citizens’ best interests at heart. This might actually describe the majority of authoritarian places and points in time. But then they don’t have the safeguards in place to stop bad leadership from metastasizing if and when it does pop up, and that is how you get history’s worst and longest-lasting geopolitical disasters. I’m not guaranteeing the U.S. has the immune system to successfully fight off our currently spreading political and economic cancer, only time will tell.