MIT Technology Review

Casey Crownhart writes:

In the age of AI, the biggest barrier to progress isn’t money but energy. That should be particularly worrying here in the US, where massive data centers are waiting to come online, and it doesn’t look as if the country will build the steady power supply or infrastructure needed to serve them all.

It wasn’t always like this. For about a decade before 2020, data centers were able to offset increased demand with efficiency improvements. Now, though, electricity demand…

It was October 2024, and Hurricane Helene had just devastated the US Southeast. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia found an abstract target on which to pin the blame: “Yes they can control the weather,” she posted on X. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

She was repeating what’s by now a pretty familiar and popular conspiracy theory: that shadowy forces are out there, wielding technology to control the weather and wreak havoc on their enemies. This…

At the same time, companies must strengthen the security of their AI models and data to reduce exposure to manipulation from AI-enabled malware. Such risks could include, for instance, prompt injections, where a malicious user crafts a prompt to manipulate an AI model into performing unintended actions, bypassing its original instructions and safeguards.

Agentic AI further ups the ante, with hackers able to use AI agents to automate attacks and make tactical decisions without constant human oversight….

Casey Crownhart writes:

In the age of AI, the biggest barrier to progress isn’t money but energy. That should be particularly worrying here in the US, where massive data centers are waiting to come online, and it doesn’t look as if the country will build the steady power supply or infrastructure needed to serve them all.

It wasn’t always like this. For about a decade before 2020, data centers were able to offset increased demand with efficiency improvements. Now, though, electricity demand is…

—Senator Bernie Sanders reacts to Tesla shareholders’ decision to award Elon Musk a $1 trillion pay package in a post on X.

One more thing

Finding forgotten Indigenous landscapes with electromagnetic technology

The fertile river valleys of the American Midwest hide tens of thousands of Indigenous earthworks, according to experts: geometric structures consisting of walls, mounds, ditches, and berms, some dating back nearly 3,000 years.

Archaeologists now believe that the earthworks functioned…

COURTESY MARK HARRIS

Once it is sealed and moved to its permanent home beneath the waves of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary early next year, Vanguard will be the world’s first new subsea habitat in nearly four decades. Teams of four scientists will live and work on the seabed for a week at a time, entering and leaving the habitat as scuba divers. Their missions could include reef restoration, species surveys, underwater archaeology, or even astronaut training. 

One of Vanguard’s…

And some animal welfare groups are opposed to the practice of pet cloning. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) described it as “a horror show,” and the UK’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) says that “there is no justification for cloning animals for such trivial purposes.” 

But there are other uses for cloning technology that are arguably less trivial. Wisely has long been interested in diversifying the gene pool of the critically endangered…

“The opportunistic side of me is realizing that your average accountant won’t be doing this.”

—Sal Abdulla, founder of accounting-software startup NixSheets, tells the Wall Street Journal he’s using AI tools to gain an edge on his competitors.

One more thing

Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine

Many challenges in medicine stem, in large part, from a common root cause: a severe shortage of ethically-sourced human bodies.

There might be a way to get out…

Just as with climate change, we need to look at this as a system rather than a series of individual choices. 

Massive tech companies using AI in their products should be disclosing their total energy and water use and going into detail about how they complete their calculations. Estimating the burden per query is a start, but we also deserve to see how these impacts add up for billions of users, and how that’s changing over time as companies (hopefully) make their products more efficient. Lawmakers…

Helios is noteworthy for its qubits’ precision, says Rajibul Islam, a physicist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who is not affiliated with Quantinuum. The computer’s qubit error rates are low to begin with, which means it doesn’t need to devote as much of its hardware to error correction. Quantinuum had pairs of qubits interact in an operation known as entanglement and found that they behaved as expected 99.921% of the time. “To the best of my knowledge, no other platform is at this…