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    What will the AI revolution mean for the global south?

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    View image in fullscreenI come from Trinidad and Tobago. As a country that was once colonized by the British, I am wary of the ways that inequalities between the global north and global south risk being perpetuated in the digital age.When we consider the lack of inclusion of the global south in discussions about artificial intelligence (AI), I think about how this translates to an eventual lack of economic leverage and geopolitical engagement in this technology that has captivated academics within the industrialised country I reside, the United States.As a scientist, I experienced an early rite of passage into the world of Silicon Valley, the land of techno-utopianism, and the promise of AI as a net positive for all. But, as an academic attending my first academic AI conference in 2019, I began to notice inconsistencies in the audience to whom the promise of AI was directed. AI researchers can often identify consistent choices for locations where such conferences are hosted, and where they are not. NeurIPS, one of the top AI conferences, has highlighted annual issues for obtaining visas for academic attendees and citizens from the African continent. Attending such a prestigious conference in the field grants one the opportunity to gain access to peers in the field, new collaborations and feedback on one’s work.I often hear the word “democratisation” within the AI community, an implication of equity in access, opportunity and merit for contribution regardless of one’s country of origin. Associate professor of economics Fadhel Kaboub talks about how “a lack of vision for oneself results in being a part of someone else’s vision”, reflecting on how systematically lacking an access to infrastructure results in local trade deficits in economies.As in the time of Nafta’s promise of “free trade”, promises of “AI democratisation” today still exist and benefit mainly countries with access to tech hubs not located in the global south. While the United States and other industrialized countries dominate in access to computational power and research activity, much of the low-paid manual labour involved in labelling data and the global underclass in artificial intelligence still exists in the global south.Much like coffee, cocoa, bauxite and sugar cane are produced in the global south, exported cheaply and sold at a premium in more industrialized countries, over the past few years we have seen influence in AI inextricably tied to energy consumption. Countries that can afford to consume more energy have more leverage in reinforcing power to shape the future direction of AI and what is considered valuable within the AI academic community.In 2019, Mary L Gray and Siddharth Suri published Ghost Work, which exposed the invisible labour of technology today, and at the beginning of my tenure at graduate school, the heavily cited paper Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence was published. It has been five years since these seminal works. What would an AI community inspired by the Brics organisation, which united major emerging economies to advocate for themselves in a system dominated by western countries, look like for the global south?I often ask myself how AI has contributed to our legacy, and whose stories it won’t tell. Has AI mitigated issues of mistrust and corruption in less-resourced countries? Has it benefited our civic communities or narrowed educational gaps between less-resourced regions? How will it make society better, and whose society will it make better? Who will be included in that future?A historical mistrust can impede adoption by developing countries. Furthermore, many developing countries have weak institutional infrastructures, poor or nonexistent laws and regulatory frameworks for data projection and cybersecurity. Therefore, even with an improved information infrastructure, they are likely to function at a disadvantage in the global information marketplace.A currency is only as good as its perceived global trust. When thinking about the democratization in AI and a vision of what it could be in years to come, AI’s survival requires including more perspectives from regions such as the global south. Countries from the global south should work together to build their own markets and have a model of sovereignty for their data and data labour.Economic models often consider a definition of development that includes a measure of improvement in the quality of life of the most marginalized of its people. It is my hope that in the future that will extend to our evaluation of AI.

    Krystal Maughan is a PhD student at the University of Vermont studying differential privacy and machine learning More

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      Doge reportedly using AI tool to create ‘delete list’ of federal regulations

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      The “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is using artificial intelligence to create a “delete list” of federal regulations, according to a report, proposing to use the tool to cut 50% of regulations by the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s second inauguration.The “Doge AI Deregulation Decision Tool” will analyze 200,000 government regulations, according to internal documents obtained by the Washington Post, and select those which it deems to be no longer required by law.Doge, which was run by Elon Musk until May, claims that 100,000 of those regulations can then be eliminated, following some staff feedback.A PowerPoint presentation made public by the Post claims that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) used the AI tool to make “decisions on 1,083 regulatory sections”, while the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau used it to write “100% of deregulations”.The Post spoke to three HUD employees who told the newspaper AI had been “recently used to review hundreds, if not more than 1,000, lines of regulations”.During his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump claimed that government regulations were “driving up the cost of goods” and promised the “most aggressive regulatory reduction” in history. He repeatedly criticized rules which aimed to tackle the climate crisis, and as president he ordered the heads of all government agencies to undertake a review of all regulations in coordination with Doge.Asked about the use of AI in deregulation by the Post, White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said “all options are being explored” to achieve the president’s deregulation promises. Fields said that “no single plan has been approved or green-lit”, and the work is “in its early stages and is being conducted in a creative way in consultation with the White House”.Fields added: “The Doge experts creating these plans are the best and brightest in the business and are embarking on a never-before-attempted transformation of government systems and operations to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.”Musk appointed a slew of inexperienced staffers to Doge, including Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old who was previously known by the online handle “Big Balls”. Earlier this year, Reuters reported that Coristine was one of two Doge associates promoting the use of AI across the federal bureaucracy. More

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      Trump signs executive orders targeting ‘woke’ AI models and regulation

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      Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a trio of executive orders that he vowed would turn the United States into an “AI export powerhouse”, including one targeting what the White House described as “woke” artificial intelligence models.During remarks at an AI summit in Washington, Trump decried “woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models”, before signing the orders on stage at the Mellon Auditorium.“Once and for all, we are getting rid of woke. Is that OK?” Trump said, drawing loud applause from the audience of AI industry leaders. He then asserted that his predecessor, Joe Biden, had “established toxic diversity, equity and inclusion ideology as a guiding principle of American AI development”.“So you immediately knew that was the end of your development,” he said, eliciting laughter.The new order requires any artificial intelligence company receiving federal funding to maintain politically neutral AI models free of “ideological dogmas such as DEI” – putting pressure on an industry increasingly seeking to partner with government agencies. It is part of the Trump administration’s broader anti-diversity campaign that has also targeted federal agencies, academic institutions and the military.While the directive emphasizes that the federal government “should be hesitant to regulate the functionality of AI models in the private marketplace”, it asserts that public procurement carries “the obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas”. The metrics of what make an AI model politically biased are contentious and open to interpretation, however, and therefore may allow the administration to use the order to target companies at its discretion.The other orders were aimed at expediting federal permitting for datacentre infrastructure and promoting the export of American AI models. The executive actions coincide with the Trump administration’s release of a broader, 24-page “AI action plan” that seeks to cement the US’s “global dominance” in artificial intelligence as well as expand the use of AI in the federal government.“Winning this competition will be a test of our capacities unlike anything since the dawn of the space age,” Trump declared, adding: “We need US technology companies to be all-in for America. We want you to put America first.”Earlier on Wednesday, the White House unveiled its long-promised “action plan”, titled “Winning the Race”, that was announced shortly after Trump took office and repealed a Biden administration order on AI that mandated some safeguards and standards on the technology. It outlines the White House’s vision for governing artificial intelligence in the US, vowing to speed up the development of the fast-growing technology by removing “red tape and onerous regulation”.During his remarks, Trump also proposed a more nominal change. “I can’t stand it,” he said, referring to the use of the word “artificial”. “I don’t even like the name, you know? I don’t like anything that’s artificial. So could we straighten that out, please? We should change the name. I actually mean that.”“It’s not artificial. It’s genius,” he added.A second order Trump signed on Wednesday calls for deregulating AI development, increasing the building of datacentres and removing environmental protections that could hamper their construction.Datacentres that house the servers for AI models require immense amounts of water and energy to function, as well as produce greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental groups have warned about harmful increases to air and noise pollution as tech companies build more facilities, while a number of local communities have pushed back against their construction.In addition to easing permitting laws and emphasizing the need for more energy infrastructure, both measures that tech companies have lobbied for, Trump’s order also frames the AI race as a contest for geopolitical dominance. China has invested billions into the manufacturing of AI chips and datacentres to become a competitor in the industry, while Chinese companies such as Deepseek have released AI models that rival Silicon Valley’s output.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile Trump’s plan seeks to address fears of China as an AI superpower, the Trump administration’s move against “woke” AI echoes longstanding conservative grievances against tech companies, which Republicans have accused of possessing liberal biases and suppressing rightwing ideology. As generative AI has become more prominent in recent years, that criticism has shifted from concerns over internet search results or anti-misinformation policies into anger against AI chatbots and image generators.One of the biggest critics of perceived liberal bias in AI is Elon Musk, who has vowed to make his xAI company and its Grok chatbot “anti-woke”. Although Musk and Donald Trump are still locked in a feud after their public falling out last month, Musk may stand to benefit from Trump’s order given his emphasis on controlling AI’s political outputs.Musk has consistently criticized AI models, including his own, for failing to generate what he sees as sufficiently conservative views. He has claimed that xAI has reworked Grok to eliminate liberal bias, and the chatbot has occasionally posted white supremacist and antisemitic content. In May, Grok affirmed white supremacist conspiracies that a “white genocide” was taking place in South Africa and said it was “instructed by my creators” to do so. Earlier this month, Grok also posted pro-Nazi ideology and rape fantasies while identifying itself as “MechaHitler” until the company was forced to intervene.Despite Grok’s promotion of Nazism, xAI was among several AI companies that the Department of Defense awarded with up to $200m contracts this month to develop tools for the government. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, all of which have their own proprietary AI models, were the other recipients.Conservatives have singled out incidents such as Google’s Gemini image generator inaccurately producing racially diverse depictions of historical figures such as German second world war soldiers as proof of liberal bias. AI experts have meanwhile long warned about problems of racial and gender bias in the creation of artificial intelligence models, which are trained on content such as social media posts, news articles and other forms of media that may contain stereotypes or discriminatory material that gets incorporated into these tools. Researchers have found that these biases have persisted despite advancements in AI, with models often replicating existing social prejudices in their outputs.Conflict over biases in AI have also led to turmoil in the industry. In 2020, the co-lead of Google’s “ethical AI” team Timnit Gebru said she was fired after she expressed concerns of biases being built into the company’s AI models and a broader lack of diversity efforts at the company. Google said she resigned. More

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      Climate advocates outraged at Trump administration plans to fast-track AI sector

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      The Trump administration has unveiled plans to speed the development of the highly polluting artificial intelligence sector, sparking outrage from climate advocates.Rolled out on Wednesday, the 28-page scheme pledges to remove so-called “bureaucratic red tape” and streamline permitting for datacenters, semiconductor manufacturing facilities and fossil fuel infrastructure.To do so, it will dismantle some environmental and land-use regulations, roll back some Biden-era rules for subsidies for semiconductor plants related to climate requirements, and seek to establish exclusions for datacenters from the National Environmental Policy Act and streamline permits under the Clean Water Act.“We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it. To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day,” the plan says. “Simply put, we need to ‘Build, Baby, Build!’”Trump is also expected to sign three AI-related executive orders on Wednesday during a keynote address at a summit in DC. The announcement will be co-hosted by bipartisan lawmakers with the Hill and Valley Forum and a business and technology podcast hosted by four technology investors and businessmen, including Trump’s AI and crypto czar, David Sacks.The AI sector is already depleting land and water resources and taking a massive toll on the climate, with AI-powered large language models such as ChatGPT taking up to 10 times more energy than a regular Google search, according to an estimate by the Electric Power Research Institute. Last year, ChatGPT used more than half a million kilowatts of electricity every day, equivalent to the daily power use of 180,000 US households.The training of a single AI model can lead to an emissions footprint that is almost five times larger than the lifetime carbon footprint of the average American car. Recent research from Food and Water Watch also found that energy demand from AI servers and datacenters in the US is expected to increase up to threefold from 2023 to 2028, which could lead the US sector to, by 2028, annually consume enough water to fill more than 1m Olympic-size swimming pools and enough electricity to power more than 28m American households.“At its core, President Trump’s AI agenda is nothing more than a thinly veiled invitation for the fossil fuel and corporate water industries to ramp up their exploitation of our environment and natural resources – all at the expense of everyday people,” said Mitch Jones, a managing director Food and Water Watch, an environmental advocacy group.The new plan recommends that regulators review states’ AI laws to see whether they interfere with the agency’s authority. It also says federal agencies will “consider a state’s AI regulatory climate when making funding decisions” and “limit funding if the state’s AI regulatory regimes may hinder the effectiveness of that funding or award”.Republicans earlier this year attempted to enact a version of this by placing a moratorium on states’ ability to impose regulations on artificial intelligence into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but the provision was stripped at the last minute.“Under this plan, tech giants get sweetheart deals while everyday Americans will see their electricity bills rise to subsidize discounted power for massive AI datacenters,” said JB Branch, a big-tech accountability advocate with the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. “States are held hostage: either stop protecting their residents from dangerous, untested AI products, or lose federal funding.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs a counterweight to the new Trump plan, a broad coalition of more than 90 advocacy groups – including climate and environmental justice non-profits, consumer protection organizations and labor advocates – published an open letter calling for a “people’s AI action plan” that prioritizes “public wellbeing, shared prosperity, a sustainable future and security”.“We can’t let big tech and big oil lobbyists write the rules for AI and our economy at the expense of our freedom and equality, workers and families’ wellbeing,” the coalition wrote.Research shows that many datacenters used for AI are placed near low-income communities of color, which are already often overburdened by pollution.“People sacrifice their health, their wellbeing and, too often, their future, so that others can benefit,” said Sharon Lewis, executive director of the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice. “We’re told these datacenters are harmless, but even though they might seem like they pose no risk, in reality, these energy-hungry, pollution-intensive facilities are just as damaging to our environment and health.” More

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      OpenAI CEO tells Federal Reserve confab that entire job categories will disappear due to AI

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      During his latest trip to Washington, OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, painted a sweeping vision of an AI-dominated future in which entire job categories disappear, presidents follow ChatGPT’s recommendations and hostile nations wield artificial intelligence as a weapon of mass destruction, all while positioning his company as the indispensable architect of humanity’s technological destiny.Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve board of governors, Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be completely eliminated by AI advancement.“Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone,” he said, singling out customer support roles. “That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine.”The OpenAI founder described the transformation of customer service as already complete, telling the Federal Reserve vice-chair for supervision, Michelle Bowman: “Now you call one of these things and AI answers. It’s like a super-smart, capable person. There’s no phone tree, there’s no transfers. It can do everything that any customer support agent at that company could do. It does not make mistakes. It’s very quick. You call once, the thing just happens, it’s done.”The OpenAI founder then turned to healthcare, making the suggestion that AI’s diagnostic capabilities had surpassed human doctors, but wouldn’t go so far as to accept the superior performer as the sole purveyor of healthcare.“ChatGPT today, by the way, most of the time, can give you better – it’s like, a better diagnostician than most doctors in the world,” he said. “Yet people still go to doctors, and I am not, like, maybe I’m a dinosaur here, but I really do not want to, like, entrust my medical fate to ChatGPT with no human doctor in the loop.”His visit to Washington was aligned with the Trump administration’s unveiling of its “AI action plan”, which is focused defining and easing some regulations and promoting more datacenters. Altman’s latest engagement is with the federal government under Donald Trump, which has taken on a new tune compared with years past. While much has changed with the tech over the years, under the Biden administration, OpenAI and its rivals asked the government to regulate AI. Meanwhile under Trump, they talk of accelerating to beat China.At the fireside chat, he said one of his biggest worries was over AI’s rapidly advancing destructive capabilities, with one scenario that kept him up at night being a hostile nation using these weapons to attack the US financial system. And despite being in awe of advances in voice cloning, Altman warned the crowd about how that same benefit could enable sophisticated fraud and identity theft, considering that “there are still some financial institutions that will accept the voiceprint as authentication”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOpenAI and Altman are already under way on their big pivot to Washington, attempting to crash a party at which Elon Musk once held the golden ticket. Along with announcing plans to open his company’s first office in Washington next year, Altman faced the Senate commerce committee for his first congressional testimony since his high-profile appearance in May 2023 that propelled him on to the global stage. More

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      Medical charlatans have existed through history. But AI has turbocharged them | Edna Bonhomme

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      Nearly a year into parenting, I’ve relied on advice and tricks to keep my baby alive and entertained. For the most part, he’s been agile and vivacious, and I’m beginning to see an inquisitive character develop from the lump of coal that would suckle from my breast. Now he’s started nursery (or what Germans refer to as Kita), other parents in Berlin, where we live, have warned me that an avalanche of illnesses will come flooding in. So during this particular stage of uncertainty, I did what many parents do: I consulted the internet.This time, I turned to ChatGPT, a source I had vowed never to use. I asked a straightforward but fundamental question: “How do I keep my baby healthy?” The answers were practical: avoid added sugar, monitor for signs of fever and talk to your baby often. But the part that left me wary was the last request: “If you tell me your baby’s age, I can tailor this more precisely.” Of course, I should be informed about my child’s health, but given my growing scepticism towards AI, I decided to log off.Earlier this year, an episode in the US echoed my little experiment. With a burgeoning measles outbreak, children’s health has become a significant political battleground, and the Department of Health and Human Services, under the leadership of Robert F Kennedy, has initiated a campaign titled the Make America Healthy Again commission, aimed at combating childhood chronic disease. The corresponding report claimed to address the principal threats to children’s health: pesticides, prescription drugs and vaccines. Yet the most striking aspect of the report was the pattern of citation errors and unsubstantiated conclusions. External researchers and journalists believed that these pointed to the use of ChatGPT in compiling the report.What made this more alarming was that the Maha report allegedly included studies that did not exist. This coincides with what we already know about AI, which has been found not only to include false citations but also to “hallucinate”, that is, to invent nonexistent material. The epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, who was listed in the Maha report as the first author of a study on anxiety and adolescents, said: “The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with.”The threat of AI may feel new, but its role in spreading medical myths fits into an old mould: that of the charlatan peddling false cures. During the 17th and 18th centuries, there was no shortage of quacks selling reagents intended to counteract intestinal ruptures and eye pustules. Although not medically trained, some, such as Buonafede Vitali and Giovanni Greci, were able to obtain a licence to sell their serums. Having a public platform as grand as the square meant they could gather in public and entertain bystanders, encouraging them to purchase their products, which included balsamo simpatico (sympathetic balm) to treat venereal diseases.RFK Jr believes that he is an arbiter of science, even if the Maha report appears to have cited false information. What complicates charlatanry today is that we’re in an era of far more expansive tools, such as AI, which ultimately have more power than the swindlers of the past. This disinformation may appear on platforms that we believe to be reliable, such as search engines, or masquerade as scientific papers, which we’re used to seeing as the most reliable sources of all.Ironically, Kennedy has claimed that leading peer-reviewed scientific journals such as the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine are corrupt. His stance is especially troubling, given the influence he wields in shaping public health discourse, funding and official panels. Moreover, his efforts to implement his Maha programme undermine the very concept of a health programme. Unlike science, which strives to uncover the truth, AI has no interest in whether something is true or false.AI is very convenient, and people often turn to it for medical advice; however, there are significant concerns with its use. It is injurious enough to refer to it as an individual, but when a government significantly relies on AI for medical reports, this can lead to misleading conclusions about public health. A world filled with AI platforms creates an environment where fact and fiction meld into each other, leaving minimal foundation for scientific objectivity.The technology journalist Karen Hao astutely reflected in the Atlantic: “How do we govern artificial intelligence? With AI on track to rewire a great many other crucial functions in society, that question is really asking: how do we ensure that we’ll make our future better, not worse?” We need to address this by establishing a way to govern its use, rather than adopting a heedless approach to AI by the government.Individual solutions can be helpful in assuaging our fears, but we require robust and adaptable policies to hold big tech and governments accountable regarding AI misuse. Otherwise, we risk creating an environment where charlatanism becomes the norm.

      Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science More

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      in US Politics

      Doge wants to replace our institutions with a tech utopia. It won’t work | Mike Pepi

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      Elon Musk has stepped away from Doge with very little “efficiency” to show for it. While it may have been more of a showpiece than real policy, this brutal and short experiment in Silicon Valley governance reveals a long-simmering battle between digital utopians and the institutional infrastructures critical to functioning democracies.Doge’s website dubiously claims $190bn in savings. The receipts show that they are less about efficiency than they are aimed at effective dissolution, a fate met by USAID, the federal agency responsible for distributing foreign assistance.Don’t be fooled. These brash new reductions are not just your garden-variety small-government crusades or culture-war skirmishes. This administration’s war on institutions derives from the newfound power of Silicon Valley ideology – a techno-determinism that views each institution’s function as potential raw material for capture by private digital platforms.All the while, Elon Musk sold the White House on an “AI-first strategy” for the US government. The recent executive order Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence mandates that barely tested Silicon Valley AI be jammed into the government’s work. It directs agencies to use AI to “lessen the burden of bureaucratic restrictions”. This is a thinly veiled attempt not just to reduce institutional activities; it’s also a degradation play.Doge makes plain an often misunderstood tension: Silicon Valley’s final dream is a world without institutions. Since the rise of the internet, startups have long encouraged, and profited from, institutional decline. This anti-institutionalism goes back to the roots of computing. Charles Babbage’s difference engine, central to modern computing, was built on technologies meant to control labor. It was a reflection of Babbage’s belief that the highest intention of the factory manager was to reduce the skill and cognitive complexity of laborers’ tasks. If the machine could manage production, humans – now smoothed-out automatons – would hardly need accompanying social protections, or even any governance at all.In 1948, Norbert Wiener founded the discipline of cybernetics, “the science of control and communications in the animal and machine”. This automated governance was eventually brought into direct competition with public institutions. The revolt against the state took many forms in the history of computing thereafter, from the libertarian California ideology (“information wants to be free”) to the very idea that a new “cyberspace” would be liberated from governments. Here the individual is an entrepreneur of the mind, able to instantly improve their lot without the mediating hand of the institutional form.To get to the real heart of Doge’s ideology, read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond’s manifesto on building open-source software. For Raymond, cathedrals are “carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation”. This slow, deliberate work is no match for the networked and digitally enabled bazaar, where many software developers move fast by releasing early and often, delegate everything they can, and are open to the point of promiscuity. Something like scripture for computer engineers, Raymond’s ideas soon jumped out of the network and into governance of the physical world, where all human organizations were scrutinized as the maligned “cathedral”.Entrepreneurs loved this idea, too. The management method known as the “lean startup” is a lightweight program of data-driven optimizations designed to quickly scale businesses. Instead of human labor and judgment, lean startups use data and algorithms to experiment their way toward governance.But there’s a catch: a public institution is not supposed to be run like a digital startup. Silicon Valley may have carved out a niche in which its organizational philosophies mastered food delivery apps, AI girlfriends and money-laundering shitcoins, but the moment they take these methods to institutions entrusted with public welfare, they’ve lost the plot. Governments don’t have customers – they care for citizens. If classical liberalism had the state and its many sovereign institutions, and neoliberalism had the divine hand of the free market, today’s platform class elevates computation as the ultimate arbiter of truth. When presented with an institutional force, the platform class first asks: how could this be delivered by way of a digital platform?Digital technology doesn’t have to be this way. Good software can augment institutions, not be the rationale for their deletion. Building this future requires undoing Silicon Valley’s pernicious opposition to the institutional form. By giving into the digital utopian’s anti-institutionalism, we allowed them to reshape government according to their growth-at-all-costs logic.If the newly empowered digital utopianism goes unchecked, we face a platform-archy where black-box AI makes decisions once adjudicated through democratic institutions. This isn’t just a Silicon Valley efficiency fantasy; it’s on the roadmap of every authoritarian who ever sniffed power.Thankfully, the anti-Doge backlash was swift. The abrupt layoffs backfired, leading many Americans to fully understand just how much research and resources for advancing science, medicine and culture are tied to federal support.In the private sector, since capital is no longer free after the federal government hiked interest rates in 2022, the growth of the big Silicon Valley platforms have almost completely stalled. In search of an answer, Silicon Valley is making a big bet on AI, overwhelming users with automated answers that hallucinate and mislead at every turn. It’s becoming harder and harder for the average person to buy what the digital utopians are selling.The response to this assault on our institutions might be a kind of Digital New Deal – a public plan for institutions in the AI era. This 21st-century economics must go well beyond solving for mass unemployment. Reconstructing the institutional foundations of public goods such as journalism, libraries and higher education requires more than just restoring the public funds stripped by Doge. It will require forceful assertions about their regulatory value in the face of a fully automated slop state. Governments come and go, but free and open institutions are critical to the functioning of democracy. If we make the mistake of misrecognizing digital platforms for public institutions, we will not easily reverse Doge’s mistakes.

      Mike Pepi is a technologist and author who has written widely about the intersection between culture and the Internet. His book, Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, was published by Melville House in 2025 More

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      in US Politics

      Trump’s tax bill seeks to prevent AI regulations. Experts fear a heavy toll on the planet

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      US Republicans are pushing to pass a major spending bill that includes provisions to prevent states from enacting regulations on artificial intelligence. Such untamed growth in AI will take a heavy toll upon the world’s dangerously overheating climate, experts have warned.About 1bn tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide are set to be emitted in the US just from AI over the next decade if no restraints are placed on the industry’s enormous electricity consumption, according to estimates by researchers at Harvard University and provided to the Guardian.This 10-year timeframe, a period of time in which Republicans want a “pause” of state-level regulations upon AI, will see so much electricity use in data centers for AI purposes that the US will add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than Japan does annually, or three times the yearly total from the UK.The exact amount of emissions will depend on power plant efficiency and how much clean energy will be used in the coming years, but the blocking of regulations will also be a factor, said Gianluca Guidi, visiting scholar at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.“By limiting oversight, it could slow the transition away from fossil fuels and reduce incentives for more energy-efficient AI energy reliance,” Guidi said.“We talk a lot about what AI can do for us, but not nearly enough about what it’s doing to the planet. If we’re serious about using AI to improve human wellbeing, we can’t ignore the growing toll it’s taking on climate stability and public health.”Donald Trump has vowed that the US will become “the world capital of artificial intelligence and crypto” and has set about sweeping aside guardrails around AI development and demolishing rules limiting greenhouse gas pollution.The “big beautiful” reconciliation bill passed by Republicans in the House of Representatives would bar states from adding their own regulations upon AI and the GOP-controlled Senate is poised to pass its own version doing likewise.Unrestricted AI use is set to deal a sizable blow to efforts to tackle the climate crisis, though, by causing surging electricity use from a US grid still heavily reliant upon fossil fuels such as gas and coal. AI is particularly energy-hungry – one ChatGPT query needs about 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query.Carbon emissions from data centers in the US have tripled since 2018, with an upcoming Harvard research paper finding that the largest “hyperscale” centers now account for 2% of all US electricity use.“AI is going to change our world,” Manu Asthana, chief executive of the PJM Interconnection, the US largest grid, has predicted. Asthana estimated that almost all future increase in electricity demand will come from data centers, adding the equivalent of 20m new homes to the grid in the next five years.The explosive growth of AI has, meanwhile, worsened the recent erosion in climate commitments made by big tech companies. Last year, Google admitted that its greenhouse gas emissions have grown by 48% since 2019 due to its own foray into AI, meaning that “reducing emissions may be challenging” as AI further takes hold.Proponents of AI, and some researchers, have argued that advances in AI will aid the climate fight by increasing efficiencies in grid management and other improvements. Others are more skeptical. “That is just a greenwashing maneuver, quite transparently,” said Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. “There have been some absolutely nonsense things said about this. Big tech is mortgaging the present for a future that will never come.”While no state has yet placed specific green rules upon AI, they may look to do so given cuts to federal environmental regulations, with state lawmakers urging Congress to rethink the ban. “If we were expecting any rule-making at the federal level around data centers it’s surely off the table now,” said Hanna. “It’s all been quite alarming to see.”Republican lawmakers are undeterred, however. The proposed moratorium cleared a major hurdle over the weekend when the Senate parliamentarian decided that the proposed ban on state and local regulation of AI can remain in Trump’s tax and spending mega-bill. The Texas senator Ted Cruz, the Republican who chairs the Senate committee on commerce, science and transportation, changed the language to comply with the Byrd Rule, which prohibits “extraneous matters” from being included in such spending bills.The provision now refers to a “temporary pause” on regulation instead of a moratorium. It also includes a $500m addition to a grant program to expand access to broadband internet across the country, preventing states from receiving those funds if they attempt to regulate AI.The proposed AI regulation pause has provoked widespread concern from Democrats. The Massachusetts senator Ed Markey, a climate hawk, says he has prepared an amendment to strip the “dangerous” provision from the bill.“The rapid development of artificial intelligence is already impacting our environment, raising energy prices for consumers, straining our grid’s ability to keep the lights on, draining local water supplies, spewing toxic pollution in communities, and increasing climate emissions,” Markey told the Guardian.“However, instead of allowing states to protect the public and our planet, Republicans want to ban them from regulating AI for 10 years. It is shortsighted and irresponsible.”The Massachusetts congressman Jake Auchincloss has also called the proposal “a terrible idea and an unpopular idea”.“I think we have to realize that AI is going to suffuse in rapid order many dimensions of healthcare, media, entertainment, education, and to just proscribe any regulation of AI in any use case for the next decade is unbelievably reckless,” he said.Some Republicans have also come out against the provision, including the Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn and the Missouri senator Josh Hawley. An amendment to remove the pause from the bill would require the support of at least four Republican senators to pass.Hawley is said to be willing to introduce an amendment to remove the provision later this week if it is not eliminated beforehand.Earlier this month, the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene admitted she had missed the provision in the House version of the bill, and that she would not have backed the legislation if she had seen it. The far-right House Freedom caucus, of which Greene is a member, has also come out against the AI regulation pause. More

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      in US Politics

      Doge employee ‘Big Balls’ has resigned, says White House official

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      One of the US so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) service’s best-known employees, 19-year-old Edward Coristine, has resigned from the US government, a White House official said on Tuesday, a month after the acrimonious departure of his former boss Elon Musk.The White House official gave no further details on the move and Coristine did not immediately return an email seeking comment.Coristine worked at Musk’s brain connectivity company Neuralink before joining the tech billionaire as he led Doge established by the Trump administration earlier this year. Doge has overseen job cuts at almost every federal agency but is starting to see losses itself. Key Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, who was in charge of day-to-day running of Doge, has also left, along with others.The White House has said that Doge’s mission will continue.Coristine’s youth and online moniker “Big Balls” became a pop-culture meme as Doge swept through the US government, seizing data and firing employees en masse.Last month, Reuters reported that Coristine was one of two Doge associates promoting the use of AI across the federal bureaucracy. Media outlets, including Wired which first reported his departure, revealed that Coristine had been active in a chat room popular with hackers and previously had been fired from a job following an alleged data leak.In March, Reuters reported that Coristine had provided tech support to a cybercrime gang that had bragged about trafficking in stolen data and harassing an FBI agent.Beginning around 2022, while still in high school, Coristine ran a company called DiamondCDN that provided network services, according to corporate and digital records reviewed by Reuters and interviews with half a dozen former associates.Among its users was a website run by a ring of cybercriminals operating under the name “EGodly”, according to digital records preserved by the internet intelligence firm DomainTools and the online cybersecurity tool Any.Run.The digital records reviewed by Reuters showed the EGodly website, dataleak.fun, was tied to internet protocol addresses registered to DiamondCDN and other Coristine-owned entities between October 2022 and June 2023, and that some users attempting to access the site around that time would hit a DiamondCDN “security check”.In 2023, EGodly boasted on its Telegram channel of hijacking phone numbers, breaking into unspecified law enforcement email accounts in Latin America and Eastern Europe, and cryptocurrency theft.Early that year, the group distributed the personal details of an FBI agent who they said was investigating them, circulating his phone number, photographs of his house, and other private details on Telegram.EGodly also posted an audio recording of an obscene prank call made to the agent’s phone and a video, shot from the inside of a car, of an unknown party driving by the agent’s house in Wilmington, Delaware, at night and screaming out the window: “EGodly says you’re a bitch!“Reuters could not independently verify EGodly’s boasts of cybercriminal activity, including its claims to have hijacked phone numbers or infiltrated law enforcement emails. But it was able to authenticate the video by visiting the same Wilmington address and comparing the building to the one in the footage.The FBI agent targeted by EGodly, who is now retired, told Reuters that the group had drawn law enforcement attention because of its connection to swatting, the dangerous practice of making hoax emergency calls to send armed officers swarming targeted addresses. The agent didn’t go into detail. Reuters is not identifying him out of concern for further harassment.“These are bad folks,” the former agent said. “They’re not a pleasant group.” More