The AI boom requires massive data centers that consume enormous amounts of water and energy.

Tech CEOs have plans for hundreds more, but activists are fighting back to protect their communities and force us to ask who benefits from Silicon Valley’s future.disconnect.blog/ai-is-fueling-… Everything we do online has a material footprint and people started becoming more aware of that during the crypto boom. But the AI hype of the past year is also far more resource-intensive than the applications it hopes to replace.

disconnect.blog/ai-is-fueling-…

Sam Altman’s vision for AI proliferation will require a lot more computation and the energy to power it.

He admitted it at Davos, but he said we shouldn’t worry: an energy breakthrough was coming, and in the meantime we could just geoengineer the planet. disconnect.blog/sam-altmans-se… Over the past year, Altman ensured we were focused on the future by promising incredible AI benefits or scaring us with terrifying futures. That ensured OpenAI could capture the attention of lawmakers to share AI regulation. But now his story is shifting.

disconnect.blog/sam-altmans-se…

As Hyperloop One shuts down, we need to admit that the Hyperloop was never meant to be built.

Its goal was never to transform transportation for the masses, but to stop or delay high-speed rail from reaching North America. And sadly, it succeeded. disconnect.blog/p/the-hyperloo… It’s been ten years since Elon Musk first laid out the white paper, and it never really went anywhere. It was an idea that survived so long because of cheap money and is finally dying now that interest rates have made such useless projects untenable.

disconnect.blog/p/the-hyperloo…

Grimes was interviewed in Wired and she truly is unhinged. Elon has a real knack for making dumb people think they’re brilliant.

Apparently she’s writing a book called “Transhumanism for Babies.” 🫠 Another of her projects is a toy that uses ChatGPT to converse with people. Grimes says it’s to help mothers because life is hard for them. Forget social programs, maternity leave, child benefits; just give them some tech trash some idiot thinks sounds interesting.

For years, the media was happy to build up Elon Musk and convince the public of his genius. But now it’s impossible to ignore who he really is.

The media failed us, and now they must reckon with how they covered him and the wider tech industry. disconnect.blog/p/the-medias-f… The media is constantly publishing stories about Musk’s most inane tweets for clicks, rarely giving the context that he almost never follows through on what he says. Those stories are a product of the media’s long informal partnership with Musk.

disconnect.blog/p/the-medias-f…

Apple’s Vision Pro headset is a $3500 product designed to isolate you from your environment and strap a screen to your face so you’re constantly making money for tech companies.

It’s not a vision for the future of computing we should accept. disconnect.blog/p/apples-visio… Vision Pro is designed be an “augmented reality” headset so you’re not completely closed off from the environment around you, but it still feels incredibly isolating despite Apple’s attempts to make it look sleek and futuristic.

disconnect.blog/p/apples-visio…

Elon Musk is man, but he’s also a character created by the media to represent the tech industry. Fawning press coverage helped him gain his wealth and power.

Now he’s now using it to spread far-right conspiracy theories. It’s time for some accountability. disconnect.blog/p/elon-musk-th… This piece is a response to a recent interview Musk gave to CNBC where he was very clear that he doesn’t care about the possible repercussions of sharing his extreme right-wing views, likely because he knows he rarely faces any consequences.

https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1658631464827617281

Elon Musk has completely lost the plot. You can tell he’s seething that the interviewer even dared to ask about the fascist, anti-Semitic things he’s been tweeting. He’s not only surrounded by yes men, but has built a far-right info bubble he wants to pull more people into.

https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1658610853514559489

The part where he quotes “Princess Bride” is honestly chilling. This is the consequence of the media hyping him up for the past two decades and making him believe he’s the genius they presented him as, then the government going along with it and never holding him to account.

Google’s vision for the future of search shows how generative AI is all about increasing corporate power.

Instead of sending you to different websites, Google has scraped the open web to generate plagiarized answers to keep you looking at ads on Google. disconnect.blog/p/google-wants… At Google I/O, the company showed off how search will change. Instead of entering your prompt and showing you “10 blue links,” it will push those links off the screen and replace your field of view with AI-generated answers.

disconnect.blog/p/google-wants…

Silicon Valley’s elite made their billions through luck, not genius. Now, to protect their privilege, they want us to believe they’re inherently superior.

For Disconnect, I explain they’re bringing eugenics back in a self-serving quest to remain on top. disconnect.blog/p/why-silicon-… Earlier this week, Elon Musk appeared on Fox News to explicitly argue against birth control and abortion access, saying it was leading to lower birth rates that threatened “civilization.” It felt necessary to connect that to a larger project.

https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1648704435898445827

what fucking sucks is that the media’s going to have a hawkish field day with this and never actually ask whether we need to hit an arbitrary 2% spending target in the first place (which, to be clear, we don’t)

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1648753668512964611

since the ukraine war the canadian media’s been even more hawkish and friendly to the military than usual, suggesting we’re underspending on the military when trudeau’s been making massive investments and that not being in aukus was a snub when we don’t need nuclear subs!

this is increasing the vibe i’m getting from twitter, elon being rorschach of course like how far does elon have to go in alienating the media and banning journalists for us all to just abandon twitter once and for all? the problem seems to be the lack of alternative

It’s so irresponsible for 60 Minutes to give its platform over to Google’s PR machine and its effort to mislead the public as to what generative AI and chatbots are actually doing, especially at a moment when there’s so much hype and interest in these technologies.

https://twitter.com/60Minutes/status/1647742247444553732

These companies have an incentive to make it seem like ChatGPT, Bard, etc. are doing a lot more than they’re actually doing. Pichai, Altman, and others are trying to draw comparisons between their tech and human minds when that’s absolutely the wrong way to understand them.

Substack says it can’t moderate hate speech because it supports free speech. Yet the framing of free speech it uses was developed by the right precisely to protect and spread their bigoted views.

In Disconnect, I explain that could be a problem for Notes. disconnect.blog/p/substack-is-… The piece is a response to a clip that went viral last week, showing not only how poorly Substack is able to articulate its approach to content moderation, but how it doesn’t seem to have thought through how that will apply to Notes.

https://twitter.com/verge/status/1646588861529706497

Uber has been cutting its losses by raising prices and taking more from drivers, explains Hubert Horan.

In 2022, Uber increased “its revenue per trip by 52% ($4.17 vs $2.74 in 2021) while forcing drivers to accept less revenue per trip (down 5% from $11.46 in 2021 to $10.93).” “Drivers were only getting 72% of each customer dollar in 2022 while Uber’s share had increased to 28%. Drivers would have received $6.5 billion more in 2022 if fares were still being split on the pre-pandemic 78%/22% basis.” nakedcapitalism.com/2023/02/hubert…

Now that the crypto hype is over, Kevin is back for the next cycle, dutifully performing his role. After taking the booster route last week, this week he warns that the AI chatbots might just be *too* powerful for us lowly humans — another gift to Microsoft and OpenAI.

https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1626216340955758594

If you’re up on your AI history, it’s impossible not to get get ELIZA vibes from this piece. Roose is doing exactly what Joseph Weizenbaum warned about decades ago: projecting his fantasies onto the program, and deepening his own commitment to them in the process.

The tech industry promised us it was going to fix our transport system. Over a decade later, it hasn’t just not delivered, it’s added a ton of digital tech to cars that make drivers even more distracted.

I dig into why this happened and its consequences. disconnect.blog/p/tech-was-sup… I place a lot of the blame for this on Tesla. Elon Musk set the template for what the electric car of the future should look like and the tech aesthetics it should emulate, and other carmakers followed. But that’s distorted our idea of what an EV should be.

Before Tesla, Elon Musk launched a company called X.com that he hoped would upend the banking system. It didn’t, but he never gave up on the idea.

Now he’s trying to recreate that vision at Twitter. I explain why it’s doomed to fail. disconnect.blog/p/elon-musk-wa… In November, Musk outlined his bigger plan for Twitter, and it quickly became clear how much of it was pulled directly out of the X.com playbook, without considering how the industry has changed in the past 20 years and why grafting it onto Twitter won’t work.

I think people like former health minister Jane Philpott who go on the news and say we already have private delivery in Canadian healthcare to assuage concerns that’s being expanded are doing us all a disservice, especially when polls show Canadians don’t support it. Yes, private delivery is more common, in part because govs went on an outsourcing campaign in recent decades (not always with the best results). Plus, even though some provinces are already doing private surgeries, the evidence in those cases shows it didn’t reduce wait times.

Starlink kicked off a race that will have severe consequences. This article is preoccupied with China’s space satellite efforts being controlled by the state, but the real issue is more basic: that we’re launching many thousands of satellites into orbit. restofworld.org/2023/china-sta… I’d prefer virtually anything happening in space not to be controlled by a private company, and we can see why: Elon Musk and the space billionaires’ efforts are not driven by any real consideration of public good or scientific progress, but are still pushing others to follow.

Whether or not the explanation makes any sense, it’s an inherently longtermist argument: what matters most is the long-term future of humanity—for Musk, that’s becoming a multiplanetary species—and the present only matters to the degree it affects the realization of that future.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1602734819225571328

So when Musk says Twitter is “eroding civilization,” which he usually frames around the “woke mind virus,” his concern isn’t really what that means for people alive today, but how he perceives it potentially making his grand future vision harder to achieve.