DragonI

Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse

Elon Musk is famous for his futuristic gambles, but Silicon Valley’s latest rush to embrace artificial intelligence scares him. And he thinks you should be frightened too.

www.vanityfair.com|Maureen Dowd

“For a meaningful partial-brain interface, I think we’re roughly four or five years away.”

“With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out.”

“It’s great when the emperor is Marcus Aurelius. It’s not so great when the emperor is Caligula.”

“Elon wants all the toys that Larry has. They’re like these two superpowers. They’re friends, but there’s a lot of tension in their relationship.” A rivalry of this kind might be best summed up by a line from the vainglorious head of the fictional tech behemoth Hooli, on HBO’s Silicon Valley: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone  else makes the world a better place better than we do.”

“Full-on A.I. is on the order of magnitude of extraterrestrials landing,” Thiel said. “There are some very deeply tricky questions around this . . . . If you really push on how do we make A.I. safe, I don’t think people have any clue. We don’t even know what A.I. is. It’s very hard to know how it would be controllable.”

He went on: “There’s some sense in which the A.I. question encapsulates all of people’s hopes and fears about the computer age. I think people’s intuitions do just really break down when they’re pushed to these limits because we’ve never dealt with entities that are smarter than humans on this planet.”

Google Will Achieve 100 Percent Renewable Energy in 2017

The web services leader crosses the finish line ahead of most of its peers.

www.greentechmedia.com

For Google, that meant serious work at the data centers to cut down on the electricity needed to run all those searches and YouTube clips. Those data centers now deliver 3.5 times as much computing power as they did five years ago, while using the same amount of electricity, the company said.

Google's parent company Alphabet also leveraged in-house expertise from DeepMind, its machine-learning subsidiary, to reduce energy needs. By training the computers to optimize operational factors like fans and cooling systems, DeepMind was able to cut the energy use for cooling data centers by 40 percent, yielding a 15 percent drop in overall energy overhead.

"[If] you can cover the roof of a data center with solar PV panels, maybe you cover 5 percent of the electricity needs," Touati said. "If you want to reach your...100 percent renewable target, the only option you have today is to actually source electricity from offsite projects."

That's what Google did, to the tune of 2.6 gigawatts worldwide. In some locations where renewable purchase options didn't exist, the company worked with the local utilities to create them. That process helped produce Duke Energy's Green Source Rider, which enabled Google to purchase power for its North Carolina data center from a 61-megawatt solar project. Now other companies can buy through that program as well.