Microsoft and G42 were planning to build a data center in Kenya, but it wanted the Kenyan government to guarantee it would pay for a certain amount of cloud capacity annually. When the Kenyan government refused, Microsoft pulled the project. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

CANADA! We are LIVE on Kinema! Please bring the film to your community or rent to watch today! kinema.com/films/ghost-...

ANNOUNCEMENT After two years of accountability failures, nine of us are suing the Calgary Police, City of Calgary & University of Calgary for brutality & Charter violations suffered May 9, 2024. We will provide a public statement at UofC TFLD Quad, 12:30pm today. drugdatadecoded.ca/for-immediat...

“Why is the proletariat not cheering for the bourgeoisie?” Look, if you believe AI is the “next Industrial Revolution,” ask yourself if weavers & the working class were super excited about factories. Then you’ll know what to say about AI at a commencement speech!

and again

Nevada's largest utility says it will need three times the electricity required to power Las Vegas just to handle proposed data centers — and it probably can't do that without fossil fuels. https://to.pbs.org/4c0Eh6n

It steals our water, it cripples our creativity & ability to think, it steals our ideas (intellectual property theft), it steals our future (accelerates climate change.)

rewatching this to spark joy

this rules

Gloria Caulfield at the UCF commencement, in case you were wondering

"Mildly positive" for hantavirus. Yeah. Like the time my girlfriend got a little bit pregnant.

“Lo recommends treating your AI investing companion similar to how he treated an exceptional teaching assistant. The TA was whipsmart, but there was one issue. He tended to smoke too much marijuana. As a result, Lo took everything he said with a grain of salt. That’s what you should do with AI.”

This product should not exist.

Could not love this piece more. Just sent it to my fall 2026 Critical AI cohort of students in case they want to read it over the summer. Thank you for this work.

"We fail to diagnose a societal illness like what is happening right now with the global buy-in to AI. But let it be noted here: the delusions of the Oligarchs might at first manifest as infrastructure, but we will later have to analyse them as societal ruins." #datacenters #environment

happy mother’s day to mother earth 🌎💙

@mark-carney.bsky.social "data centers are shutting down because they’re overheating, as the energy required to keep them running superheats the entire planet around them." futurism.com/artificial-i... law of thermodynamics: we cook the planet with perpetual energy increase

Excellent paper @olivia.science ! The AI industry has a bad case of mistaking the map for the territory, much like the imperialist cartographers in Borge's ‘Del rigor en la ciencia' that attempt to exactly represent the empire with a one-to-one scale map...doesn't go well for them.

No...you don't say...the corporation promising to solve world problems with AI is being "seriously misleading"...shocked. "looks like they are seriously misleading the council and the public over the climate pollution their facility will cause.”

Imagine talking about any other public service this way. Does the government keep public hospitals “afloat”? What about when it gave Marine Atlantic $169 million to support its operations in 24/25? The media does the bidding of those who want to private Canada Post when they adopt this framing.

I just can’t get over how willing the populace is to cede its fundamental right and ability _to_think_. Since when did that become so onerous and burdensome? Why do such large numbers of people find the idea of giving up analytical thinking a plus? Astounding and horrifying.

I love this because Anthropic also explicitly trained their model to do the blackmail thing. It’s in their system cards!

Spent a week in Nairobi speaking with data workers, organizers, activists. One story dominated every conversation: Sama, a major data annotation and moderation company, laid off 1000+ workers. Behind AI, a new “data working class” is organizing. My interview with RFI: www.rfi.fr/fr/afrique/2...

Bizarre how, despite being a photographer, 95% of the images are of her and would logically have been taken by someone else. I especially like the one of her taking a selfie. Because that's something humans do, get people to take pictures of us taking pictures of ourselves.

Nice to see an article portray AI-refusers as ppl making thoughtful and conscious decisions who we can learn from, rather than as a problem to be solved.

less ironic and more totally obvious outcome of climate denial? futurism.com/artificial-i...

"There is no such thing as the invisible hand of the market that shapes and balances [our] needs and wants. There is also no version of AI that is simply a repository of human knowledge to draw from as a commons. Instead, AI under fascist capitalism remakes the entire world into Epstein’s island."

“officials discovered two industrial-scale water hookups feeding a data center campus located 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta. One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed.”

"Arguably, much of the logic of generative AI shares in this manosphere logic, which is to blur the manufacturing of objectivity and fabrication of neutrality." 🎯🎯🎯

The last week in edtech has surely shown that schools and universities being locked in to an oligopoly of private platform vendors whose business model is based on mass data capture for value creation was not a great approach to public education even before they started forcing generative AI into it

Preprinted! Been working on this for ~1 year w wonderful coauthors Nancy & Mark: > Understanding Artificial Neural Networks: Mysterianism about Known Mechanism is Mysticism doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Have you noticed many experts say they don't understand AI? What's going on? 🤯 Let us tell you... 1/

Me! I am one of those academics and you can be one too!

One thing that really gets me — and is clearly one of the morbid symptoms we mention in this other paper doi.org/10.5281/zeno... — is how knowledge production is basically unknown to people who even 10 years ago would be fans of it. As the university is being destroyed from within and without... 1/

I discussed this with @melhogan.bsky.social @irisvanrooij.bsky.social @altibel.bsky.social too here: bsky.app/profile/melh... 3/

“University of Arizona faculty leaders are opposing a proposed change to the university email policy that would allow university officials to inspect, monitor or ask employees to disclose their email communications if they think there’s ‘reasonable suspicion’ of violations of law or UA policy.”

Vampire Slop by @mollycrabapple.bsky.social read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/...

This is what we mean when we say that "AI safety" is a eugenicist project. They fear an ultra-powerful AGI that may kill us all. Meanwhile, this Colossus 1 data center is already killing Black people in Memphis.

The "more ethical" so-called "AI safety" company everybody👇🏽

We’re already running out of water in parts of Texas. Now, data centers could take nearly 10% of our supply. Texans shouldn’t come second to tech barons. Sign our petition to protect Texas water >> www.claytontuckertx.com/water #Texas #TexasWater #WaterAccess #AIDataCenters

they’re discriminating against the data centers www.404media.co/university-c...

“Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada acknowledged using generative AI to reject an application for permanent residence on the grounds the applicant’s job duties didn’t match her claimed Canadian job experience. However, the AI tool erroneously generated the applicant’s current job duties.”

Kind of surprised that this hasn't been bigger news. It's finals week for a whole lot of universities, and yet, Canvas (a learning/grading platform used by ~9,000 schools globally) is currently inaccessible because of a pay-or-have-your-data-leaked hack. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

more evidence AI “agents” are incredibly inefficient. so much of these generative AI use cases will make no sense when people have to pay the true cost of the technology.

"Musk pledged two years ago to build a state-of-the-art water recycling plant in Memphis to guarantee that his xAI servers wouldn’t deplete the city’s groundwater" "Now that Musk’s first data center is up and running, construction on the recycling facility has come to an abrupt halt"

Experts suggest AI is a convenient excuse for tech companies needing to make layoffs.