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The Buoyancy of Immigrants and Their Success in Science

November 1, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

I have been exploring the heights of scientific endeavor in reporting on artificial intelligence, from its use in medical research (especially promising) to its use in utilities and transportation. It is notable that many of the high achievers weren’t born here.

They have come here from everywhere, but the number of Asians is notable — and in that group, the number of women stands out.

As an immigrant, I am interested in why immigrants are so buoyant, so upwardly mobile in their adopted countries. I can distill it to two things: They came to succeed, and they mostly aren’t encumbered with the social limits of their upbringing and molded expectations. America is a clean slate when you first get here.

A friend from Serbia, who ascended the heights of academe and lectured at Tulane University, said his father told him, “Don’t go to America unless you want to succeed.”

A South Korean mechanical engineer who studied at American universities and now heads an engineering company that seeks to ease the electricity crisis, told me, “I want to try harder and do something for America. I chose to come here. I want to succeed, and I want America to succeed.”

When I sat at lunch in New York with an AI startup’s senior staff, we noticed that none of us was born an American. Two of the developers were born in India, one in Spain and me in Zimbabwe.

We started to talk about what made America a haven for good minds in science and engineering and we decided it was the magnet of opportunity, Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.”

There was agreement from the startup scientists-engineers — I like the British word “boffins” for scientists and engineers taken together — that if that ever changes, if the anti-immigrant sentiment overwhelms good judgment, then the flow will stop, and the talented won’t come to America to pursue their dreams. They will go elsewhere or stay at home.

In the last several years, I have visited AI companies, interviewed many in that industry and at the great universities like Brown, UC Berkeley, MIT and Stanford, and companies like Google and Nvidia. The one thing that stands out is how many of those at the forefront weren’t born in America or are first generation.

They come from all over the globe. Asians are clearly a major force in the higher reaches of U.S. research.

At an AI conference, organized by the MIT Technology Review, the whole story of what is happening on the cutting-edge of AI was on view: faces from all over the world, new American faces. The number of immigrants was awesome, notably from Asia. They were people from the upper tier of U.S. science and engineering confidently adding to the sum of the nation’s knowledge and wealth.

Consider the leaders of top U.S. tech companies who are immigrants: Microsoft, Satya Nadella (India); Google, Sundar Pichai (India); Tesla, Elon Musk (South Africa); and Nvidia, Jensen Huang (Taiwan). Of the top seven, only Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Jeff Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Andy Jassy can be said to be traditional Americans.

A cautionary tale: A talented computer engineer from Mexico with a family that might have been plucked from the cover of the Saturday Evening Post lived in the same building as I do. During the Trump administration, they went back to Mexico.

There had been some clerical error in his paperwork. The humiliation of being treated as a criminal was such that rather than fight immigration bureaucracy, he and his family returned voluntarily to Mexico. America’s loss.

Every country that has had a large influx of migrants knows they can bring with them much that is undesirable. From Britain to Germany to Australia, immigration has had a downside: drugs, crime and religions that make assimilation difficult.

However, waves of immigrants have built America, from the Scandinavian and German wheat farmers who turned the prairies into a vast larder to the German Jews, who moved to Hollywood in the 1930s and made America pre-eminent in entertainment, to today’s global wave that is redefining Yankee know-how in the world of neural networks and quantum computing.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: AI, America, Asians, electricity, immigrants, Medical, Ronald Reagan, scientific, succeed, women

Productivity To Surge with AI. Do the Politicians Know?

September 20, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

There is every chance that the world’s industrial economies may be about to enjoy an incredible surge in productivity, something like the arrival of steam power in the 18th century.

The driver of this will be artificial intelligence. Gradually, it will seep into every aspect of our working and living, pushing up the amount produced by individual workers and leading to general economic growth.

The downside is that jobs will be eliminated, probably mostly, and historically for the first time, white-collar jobs. Put simply, office workers are going to find themselves seeking other work, maybe work that is much more physical, in everything from hospitality to healthcare to the trades.

I have canvassed many super-thinkers on AI, and they believe in unison that its impact will be seminal, game-changing, never to be switched back. Most are excited and see a better, healthier, more prosperous future, justifying the upheaval.

Omar Hatamleh, chief AI officer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and author of two books on AI and a third in preparation, misses no opportunity to emphasize that thinking about AI needs to be exponential not linear. Sadly, linear thinking is what we human beings tend to do. To my mind, Hatamleh is in the vanguard of AI thinkers,

The United States is likely to be the major beneficiary of the early waves of AI adoption and its productivity surge if we don’t try to impede the technology’s evolution with premature regulation or controls.

Economies which are sclerotic, as is much of Europe, can look to AI to get them back into growth, especially the former big drivers of growth in Europe like Germany, France and Britain, all of which are scratching their heads as to how to boost their productivity, and, hence, their prosperity.

The danger in Europe is that they will try to regulate AI prematurely and that their trades unions will resist reform of their job markets. That would leave China and the United States to duke it out for dominance of AI technology and to benefit from its boost to efficiency and productivity, and, for example, to medical research, leading to breakthroughs in longevity.

Some of the early fear of Frankenstein science has abated as early AI is being seamlessly introduced in everything from weather forecasting to wildfire control and customer relations. 

Salesforce, a leading software company that has traditionally focused on customer relations management, explains its role as connecting the dots by “layering in” AI. A visit to its website is enlightening. Salesforce has available or is developing “agents,” which are systems that operate on behalf of its customers.

If you want to know how your industry is likely to be affected, take a look at how much data it generates. If it generates scads of data — weather forecasting, electric utilities, healthcare, retailing and airlines — AI is either already making inroads or brace for its arrival. 

PFor society, the big challenge of AI isn’t going to be just the reshuffling of the workforce, but what is truth? This is not a casual question, and it should be at the forefront of wondering how to develop ways of identifying the origin of AI-generated information — data, pictures and sounds.

One way is watermarking, and it deserves all the support it can get from those who are leading the AI revolution –the big tech giants and the small startups that feed into their technology. It begs for study in the government’s many centers of research, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the great national laboratories.

Extraordinarily, as the election bears down on us, there is almost no recognition in the political parties, and the political class as a whole, that we are on the threshold of a revolution. AI is a disruptive technology that holds promise for fabulous medicine, great science and huge productivity gains.

A new epoch is at hand, and it has nothing to do with the political issues of the day.

Please Note: I will be hosting a virtual press briefing, which I have organized for the United States Energy Association, on the impact of AI in the electric utility industry on Wednesday, Oct. 2, at 11 a.m. EDT. It is open to the press and the public.

Here is the registration link: 

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BbE_VO1bRo2PuiVl6g8IzQ#/registration

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: AI, China, healthcare, jobs, linear, Omar Hatamleh, productivity, revolution, Salesforce, watermarking, workforce

Coming in AI: ‘Agents’ You Can Speak with Conversationally

September 6, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

The next big wave in artificial intelligence innovation is at hand: agents.

With agents, the usefulness of AI will increase exponentially and enable businesses and governments to streamline their operations while making them more dependable, efficient and adaptable to circumstance, according to Satya Nitta, co-founder and CEO of Emergence, the futuristic New York-based computer company.

These are the first AI systems that can speak with humans and each other conversationally, which may reduce some of the anxiety people feel about AI — this unseen force set to transform our world. These agents use AI to perceive their environment, make decisions, take actions and achieve goals autonomously, Nitta said.

The term “situational awareness” could have been created for agents because that is the key to their effectiveness.

For example, an autonomous vehicle needs a lot of awareness to be safe and operate effectively. It needs every bit of real-time knowledge that a human driver needs on the roadway, including scanning traffic on all sides of the vehicle, looking out for an approaching emergency vehicle or a child who might dash into the road, or sensing a drunk driver.

Emergence is a well-funded startup aiming to help big companies and governments by designing and deploying agents for their most complex operations. It is, perhaps, easier to see how an agent might work for an individual and then extrapolate that for a large system, Nitta suggested.

Take a family vacation. If you were using an agent to manage your vacation, it would have to have been fed some of your preferences and be able to develop others. With these to the fore, the agent would book your trip, or as much of it as you wished to hand to the agent.

The agent would know your travel budget, hotel preferences and the amusements that would interest your family. It would do some deductive reasoning to allow for what you could afford and balance that with what is available. You could discuss your itinerary with the agent as though it were a travel consultant.

Nitta and Emergence are designing agents to manage the needs of organizations, such as electric utilities and their grids, and government departments, like education and healthcare. Emergence, along with several other AI companies and researchers, has signed a pledge not to work on AI for military applications, Nitta said.

Talking about agents built on open-source Large Language Models and Large Vision Models, Nitta said, “Agents are building blocks which can communicate with each other and with humans in natural language, can control tools and can perform actions in the digital or the physical world.”

Nitta explained further, “Agents have some functional capacity. To plan, reason and remember. They are the foundations upon which scalable, intelligent systems can be built. Such systems, composed of one or more agents, can profoundly reshape our ideas of what computers can do for humanity.”

This prospect inspired the creation of Emergence and caused private investors to plow $100 million in equity funding into the venture and lenders to pledge lines of credit of an additional $30 million.

Part of the appeal of Emergence’s agents is that they will be voice-directed and you can talk to them as you would to a fellow worker or employee, to reason with them, perhaps.

Nitta said that, historically, there have been barriers to the emergence of voice fully interfacing with computing. And, he said, there has been an inability of computers to perform more than one assignment at a time. Agents will overcome these blockages.

Nitta’s agents will do enormously complex things like scheduling the inputs into an electricity grid from multiple small generators or calculating weather, currents and the endurance of fishing boats and historical fish migration patterns to help fishermen.

At the same time, they will be adjusting to changes in their environment, say, for the grid, a windstorm, or the fish are turning south, not east, as expected, or if the wholesale price of fish has dropped to change the economics of the endeavor.

To laymen and to those who have been awed by the seeming impregnable world of AI, Emergence and its agent systems are reassuring because you will be able to talk to the agents, quite possibly in colloquial English or any other language.

I feel better about AI already — AI will speak English if Nitta and his polymaths are right. AI, we should talk.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Agents, AI, autonomous, computing, Conversationally, Emergence, environment, Satya Nitta, vacation, vehicle

Postcard from A Coruña: A Summit in a Spanish City in Ascendency

August 21, 2024 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

I am one of those who believes what Seneca, the ancient Roman writer and statesman, said, “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.”

I don’t know if the stoic Seneca said that before or after his exile to the island of Corsica by the emperor Claudius.

Anyway, earlier this summer, my husband and I had the opportunity to visit a city in the country where Seneca was born: Spain. Both the city and the purpose of our trip imparted a new vigor to our minds.

We were invited to participate in the Ecosystems 2030 (ES2030) summit, held in A Coruña, a port city on a promontory in the Galicia region of northwest Spain, from June 26-29. The summit is the creation of a man with a vigorous mind: Omar Hatamleh, the head of AI at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the executive chairman of ES2030.

The annual summits in Spain — where Hatamleh lived and studied — gather speakers and participants from a wide swathe of professions, connecting the unconnected and spurring ideas. His stated aim for summiteers is for them to ditch linear thinking and “to successfully embrace disruption, transform your organization, and thrive over the next decade.” Hatamleh has used the same formula — cross-industry innovation — for meetings he has organized at NASA.

The agenda for this year’s summit, the fourth of 10, was “Women in Leadership.” And the women who addressed the summit were wonder women from private and public entities including Pilar Manchon, Google; Aylin Uysal, Oracle; Rika Nakazawa, NTT; JoAnn Stonier, Mastercard; Maria Fernandez, Sony Music Entertainment; Deepti Pahwa, an innovation and leadership coach to C-suites and entrepreneurs; Nancy Namrouqa, Jordanian minister of state for legal affairs; and Jennifer Stumm, a concert violist and founder and director of Illumina, a Sao Paulo-based music collective, festival and social group “working for greater equity and goodwill in classical music by young musicians around the world without access to private instruction or mentorship.”

In formal addresses and in conversations at lunches, dinners and in hotel lounges, these women shared their thoughts about new ventures and innovation in the AI age, the future of AI governance, e-commerce, privacy and social media, and even board member leadership. Their talk was of how they are shaping new frontiers not how they shattered barriers in the private and public sectors —refreshing and inspiring.

The summit was a movable feast, convening mostly at the avant-garde Palexco Conference Center, which is located at the city’s port and has a roof that resembles the wings of a giant seabird, the mayor’s office in the neoclassical-style City Hall, built in the early 20th century, and the two-Michelin-starred Pepe Vieira Restaurante & Hotel.

The restaurant and hotel, part of the Relais & Chateaux group, is located “in the upper area of Raxo, the smallest municipality of the municipality of Poio, in Pontevedra,” according to directions on its website.

It was an experience getting to the restaurant, which is about an hour-and-a-half drive from A Coruña through a sea of Galician vineyards and villages where the backyard of every house had wine grape vines. No grape escape.

The website says, “For a better experience in finding ‘the last kitchen in the world,’ follow our instructions, since Google has already gotten lost several times along the way.” That is truth in advising.

Pepe Vieira is located on a terraced hill overlooking the Pontevedra estuary. It is surrounded by woods, au naturel landscaping and “biodynamic” vegetable gardens, enjoyed on the patio or inside the dining room which has huge, picture windows.

Chef Vieira prepares dishes, combining “ancestral local produce, rediscovered through research with historians, scientists and anthropologists” with ingredients from afar. He prepared a variety of small dishes for us, including hake with Albariño lees, tapioca pearls and sorrel oil. His decision to locate the restaurant far from city pollution and his combination of gastronomy and sustainable gardening earned him a Michelin Green Star.

A Coruña is far from the anti-tourism protests in Madrid and Barcelona. While it is one of the chief ports of northern Spain, the country’s second-largest fishing center and has a shipyard for building fishing vessels, it also has a significant real-estate market for vacation homes — and welcomes tourists.

Cruise ships stop there and disgorge passengers who visit the Old Town and the New Town; the city’s churches, from medieval to modern; and notable landmarks, including the Roman Tower of Hercules, an imposing, square-shaped lighthouse dating from the reign of Trajan (98-117 AD). A characteristic feature of the houses is their window balconies, glazed for the Atlantic gales, giving A Coruña the name “Crystal City.”

Spaniards from the south come to this Galician city in the summer for the cool wind and the surf. As with many cities on Spain’s Atlantic coast, A Coruña is a surfer spot — with a bronze statue of two surfer dudes riding the waves in a fountain on a seafront avenue.

Photo Credit: Linda Gasparello

A Coruña has been discovered by the foodies, who have long flocked to San Sebastián, also on the Atlantic coast, close to the border with France. On the last night of Ecosystems 2030, the summiteers dined on some of the tastiest octopus in the city at Pulperia de Melide. The Galician dish of octopus sprinkled with paprika is a favorite of mine.

Seneca insisted on eating moderately, not indulging in luxuries or delicacies. He wrote,“Our aim is to live in accordance with nature, is it not?”

I don’t know if Seneca traveled to A Coruña, called Brigantium under the Romans. But I can imagine him being a happy stoic there.

Filed Under: Gasparello's Articles Tagged With: A Coruña, AI, Artificial intelligence, Ecosystems 2030, Galicia, Google, Illumina, Mastercard, NASA, NTT, Omar Hatamleh, Oracle, Palexco Conference Center, Pepe Vieira Restaurante & Hotel, Sony Music Entertainment, Spain

The Wild, Fabulous Medical Frontier with Predictive AI

August 2, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

When is a workplace at its happiest? I would submit that it is during the early stages of a project that is succeeding, whether it is a restaurant, an internet startup or a laboratory making phenomenal progress in its field of inquiry.

There is a sustained ebullience in a lab when the researchers know they are pushing back the frontiers of science, opening vistas of human possibility and reaping the extraordinary rewards that accompany just learning something big.

There has been a special euphoria in science ever since Archimedes jumped out of his bath in ancient Greece, supposedly shouting, “Eureka!”

I sensed this excitement when interviewing two exceptional scientists, Marina Sirota and Alice Tang, at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) for the independent PBS television program “White House Chronicle.”

Sirota and Tang have published a seminal paper on the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease — as much as 10 years before onset — with machine learning and artificial intelligence. The researchers were hugely excited by their findings and what their line of research will do for the early detection and avoidance of complex diseases like Alzheimer’s and many more.

It excited me — as someone who has been worried about the effect of AI on everything, from the integrity of elections to the loss of jobs — because the research at UCSF offers a clear example of the strides in medicine unfolding through computational science. “This time it’s different,” said Omar Hatamleh, who heads up AI for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Human expectations are being revolutionized in laboratories like the one in San Francisco.

Sirota said, “At my lab … the idea is to use both molecular data and clinical data (which is what you generate when you visit your doctor) and apply machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

Tang, who just finished her Ph.D. and is studying to be a medical doctor, explained, “It is the combination of diseases that allows our model to predict onset.”

In their study, Sirota and Tang found that osteoporosis is predictive of Alzheimer’s in women, highlighting the interplay between bone health and dementia risk.

The researchers used this approach to find predictive patterns from 5 million clinical patient records held by UCSF in its database. From these, there emerged a relationship between osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s, especially in women. This is important as two-thirds of Alzheimer’s sufferers are women.

The researchers cautioned that it isn’t axiomatic that osteoporosis leads to Alzheimer’s, but it is true in about 70 percent of cases. Also, they said they are critically aware of historical bias in available data — for example, that most of it is from White people in a particular socioeconomic class.

Sirota and Tang said there are contributory factors they found in Alzheimer’s. These include hypertension, vitamin D deficiency and heightened cholesterol. In men, erectile dysfunction and enlarged prostate are also predictive. These findings were published in “Nature Aging” early this year.

Predictive analysis has potential applications for many diseases. It will be possible to detect them well before onset and, therefore, to develop therapies.

This predictive analysis has been used to anticipate homelessness so that intervention — like rent assistance — can be applied before a family is thrown out on the street. Institutional charity is usually slow and often identifies at-risk people after a catastrophe.

AI is beginning to influence many aspects of our lives, from telephoning a banker to utilities’ efforts to spot and control at-risk vegetation before a spark ignites a wildfire.

While the challenges of AI, from its wrongful use by authoritarian rulers and its menace in war and social control, are real, the uses just in medicine are awesome.

In medicine, it is the beginning of a new time in human health, as the frontiers of disease are understood and pushed back as never before. Eureka! Eureka! Eureka!

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: AI, Alice Tang, Alzheimer, Archimedes, Marina Sirota, Medical, NASA, Omar Hatamleh, science

The AI Revolution Will Rival the Industrial One, and It Has Begun

June 15, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

A new age in the human experience on Earth is underway. It is an age of change as profound — and possibly more so — than the Industrial Revolution, when the steam engine introduced the concept of post-animal labor, known as shaft horsepower.

Artificial intelligence in this new age is infiltrating all areas of human endeavor.

Some things will change totally, like work: It will end much menial work and a whole tranche of white-collar jobs. Some things it will enhance beyond imagination, like medicine and associated longevity.

Some AI will threaten, some it will annihilate.

It will test our understanding of the truth in a post-fact world. The veracity of every claim will be subject to investigation, from what happened in history to current election results.

At the center of the upheaval in AI is electricity. It is the one essential element — the obedient ingredient — for AI.  Electricity is essential for the computers that support AI. However, AI is putting an incalculable strain on the electric supply.

At its annual meeting, the U.S. Energy Association learned that a search on Google today uses a tenth of the electricity as the same search on ChatGPT. Across the world, data centers are demanding an increasing supply of uninterruptible electricity 24/7. Utilities love this new business but fear they won’t be able to service it going forward.

Fortunately, AI is a valuable tool for utilities, and they are beginning to employ it increasingly in their operations, from customer services to harnessing distributed resources in what are called virtual power plants, to things such as weather prediction, counting dead trees for fire suppression, and mapping future demand.

Electricity is on the verge of a new age. And new technologies, in tandem with the relentless growth in AI, are set to overhaul our expectations for electricity generation and increase demand for it.

Fusion power, small modular reactors, viable flexible storage in the form of new battery technology and upgraded old battery technology, better transmission lines, and doubling the amount of power that can be moved from where it is made to where it is desperately needed are all on the horizon, and will penetrate the market in the next 10 years.

Synchronizing new demand with new supply has yet to happen, but electricity provision is on the march as inexorably as is AI. Together, they hold the keys to a new human future.

A new book by Omar Hatamleh, a gifted visionary, titled “This Time It’s Different,” lifts the curtain on AI. Hatamleh, chief AI officer for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., says, “This time, it truly is different. … Witness AI’s awakening, revealing its potential for both awe-inspiring transformation and trepidation.”

Hatamleh organized NASA’s first symposium on AI on June 11 at Goddard. Crème de la crème in AI participants came from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Qantm AI, Boeing and JP Morgan.

The consensus view was, to my mind, optimistically expressed by Pilar Manchon, Google’s senior director of AI, who said she thought this was the beginning of humankind’s greatest adventure. The very beginning of a new age.

A bit of backstage criticism was that the commercial pressure for the tech giants to get to market with their generative AI products has been so great that they have been releasing them before all the bugs have been ironed out — hence some of the recent ludicrous search results, like the one from this question, “How do you keep the cheese on pizza?” The answer, apparently, was with “glue.”

However, everyone agreed that these and other hallucinations won’t affect the conquering march of AI.

Government regulation? How do you regulate something that is metamorphosing second by second?

A word about Hatamleh: I first met him when he was chief engineering innovation officer at NASA in Houston. He was already thinking about AI in his pursuit of off-label drugs to treat diseases and his desire to cross-reference data to find drugs and therapies that worked in one situation but hadn’t been tried in another, especially cancer. This is now job No. 1 for AI.

During COVID, he wrangled 73 global scientists to produce a seminal report in May 2020, “Never Normal,” which predicted with eerie accuracy how COVID would affect how we work, play and socialize, and how life would change. And it has. A mere foretaste of AI?

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: AI, Artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, electricity, Fusion, Industrial Revolution, NASA, Omar Hatamleh, Pilar Manchon, technology

Texas Utility Exemplifies Struggle With Surging Demand

A graphic of the flag of Texas with wind turbines and other methods of electricity generation in the background.

April 13, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Electric utilities are doing something that is equivalent to a person changing clothes without ever getting naked.

They can’t shut down while they switch out old plants for new; they can’t turn off the lights while they retool. They must try to modernize without the communities they serve being affected by so much as a flicker.

What is called “the world’s largest machine” — the coordinated operation of the nation’s 3,000 electric utilities — must hum 24/7 while replacing old polluting plants with new less-polluting plants and adding tranches of renewable power, primarily wind and solar.

I have been watching this feat of changing in place at CPS Energy, the municipally owned electric and natural gas utility in San Antonio. And, I have been following its president and CEO, Rudy D. Garza.

It is a utility with all the stresses now faced by utilities: growing demand, pressure to retire fossil fuel plants and preparing for the onslaught of demand from data centers, driven by the need for more computing for artificial intelligence and other computing needs.

Underlying all of these challenges in San Antonio, as elsewhere, is the need to control the increase in consumer bills. Garza told me with pride that despite the pressures, CPS Energy still has among the lowest electricity rates in the country.

Some in the environmental community may have balked at the company’s recent announcement that the utility was buying two large gas turbine plants in Corpus Christi and one smaller unit used for peaking in Laredo from Talen Energy, which is emerging from bankruptcy. The deal is worth $785 million and will provide CPS Energy with a whopping 1,710 megawatts of power.

Garza told me that CPS Energy will spend additional money on bringing the purchased plants up to its operating standards and preparing them for continuous use. Talen Energy, a power merchant, used them intermittently.

The purchases will enable the utility to shut down so-called steam gas plants. These older gas-fired units don’t use modern, super-efficient turbines but operate like coal-fired plants with a boiler and a lot of wasted heat. Garza said this would reduce air pollution in San Antonio. CPS Energy is also planning to retire coal generation on an accelerated schedule.

Although CPS Energy may not be able to get off of gas entirely, it is a leader in clean energy. It is, Garza said, the largest solar generator in Texas and the second-largest wind user. It has added 50 MW of battery storage and is seeking up to 500 MW of new storage.

Out with the old and in with the new.

This includes the rising electricity demand, which is growing at a rate of 3 percent, and the looming need of data centers. The demand, fed by artificial intelligence, is incalculable and growing exponentially.

Garza said, “The wild card is how quickly these larger loads that are coming to the area get connected to the system. We’ve got eight of these (data centers) on the ground right now in San Antonio with 20 more waiting in the wings.”

Some data centers, Garza said, will need their own backup generation. Although outages are rare on the CPS Energy system, he said the 24/7 needs of the centers are such that the larger ones will have to have their own emergency backup.

CPS Energy isn’t alone in dealing with data centers. It is a challenge faced by utilities nationwide. Rene Haas, CEO of Arm, the UK chip development company, part of Japan’s SoftBank, has described the need for electricity by AI as “insatiable.” A former U.S. secretary of energy told me it is scary and underestimated.

CPS Energy is looking at ways of accommodating the data centers and is at the forefront of new ways of generating. It is collaborating with Joint Base San Antonio — the giant military installation that sits in the center of the CPS Energy service area — to explore the potential for carbon-free solutions. CPS Energy is also looking into geothermal, particularly efficiencies that can be attained with fracking technology, which has changed the oil and gas outlook.

This creativity, which is part of the electric evolution in San Antonio, is taking place across the country. Like changing clothes without getting naked, it is a challenge.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: AI, battery storage, CPS Energy, data centers, electric vehicles, electricity demand, EVs, natural gas, Rudy D. Garza, San Antonio, solar generation, Talen Energy, Texas, wind generation

AI Will Boost Productivity, Even Make Movies With the Dead

Humphrey Bogart and Dooley Wilson in "Casablanca."

February 10, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Advanced countries can expect a huge boost in productivity from artificial intelligence. In my view, it will set the stage for a new period of prosperity in the developed world — especially in the United States.

Medicine will take off as never before. Life expectancy will rise by a third.

The obverse may be that jobs will be severely affected by AI, especially in the service industries, ushering in a time of huge labor adjustment.

The danger is that we will take it as the next step in automation. It won’t. Automation increased productivity. But, creating new goods dictates new labor needs.

So far, it appears that with AI, more goods will be made by fewer people, telephones answered by ghosts and orders taken by unseen digits.

Another serious downside will be the effect on truth, knowledge and information; on what we know and what we think we know.

In the early years of the wide availability of artificial intelligence, truth will be struggling against a sea of disinformation, propaganda and lies — lies buttressed with believable fake evidence.

As Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the  University of California, Berkeley, told me when I interviewed him on the television program “White House Chronicle,” the danger is with “language in, language out.”

That succinctly sums up the threat to our well-being and stability posed by the ability to use AI to create information chaos.

At present, two ugly wars are raging and, as is the way with wars, both sides are claiming huge excesses from the other. No doubt there is truth to both claims.

But what happens when you add the ability of AI to produce fake evidence, say, huge piles of bodies that never existed? Or of children under torture?

AI, I am assured, can produce a believable image of Winston Churchill secretly meeting with Hitler, laughing together.

Establishing veracity is the central purpose of criminal justice. But with AI, a concocted video of a suspect committing a crime can be created or a home movie of a suspect far away on a beach when, in fact, the perpetrator was elsewhere, choking a victim to death.

Divorce is going to be a big arena for AI dishonesty. It is quite easy to make a film of a spouse in an adulterous situation when that never happened.

Intellectual property is about to find itself under the wheels of the AI bus. How do you trace its filching? Where do you seek redress?

Is there any safe place for creative people? How about a highly readable novel with Stephen King’s characters and a new plot? Where would King find justice? How would the reader know he or she was reading a counterfeit work?

Within a few months or years or right now, a new movie could be made featuring Marilyn Monroe and, say, George Clooney.

Taylor Swift is the hottest ticket of the time, maybe all time, but AI crooks could use her innumerable public images and voice to issue a new video or album in which she took no part and doesn’t know exists.

Here is the question: If you think it is an AI-created work, should you enjoy it? I am fond of the Judy Garland recording of “The Man That Got Away.” What if I find on the internet what purports to be Taylor Swift singing it? I know it is a forgery by AI, but I love that rendering. Should I enjoy it, and if I do, will I be party to a crime? Will I be an enabler of criminal conduct?

AI will facilitate plagiarism on an industrial scale, pervasive and uncontrollable. You might, in a few short years, be enjoying a new movie starring Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart. The AI technology is there to make such a movie and it might be as enjoyable as “Casablanca.” But it will be faked, deeply faked.

Already, truth in politics is fragile, if not broken. A plethora of commentators spews out half-truths and lies that distort the political debate and take in the gullible or just those who want to believe.

If you want to believe something, AI will oblige, whether it is about a candidate or a divinity. You can already dial up Jesus and speak to an AI-generated voice purporting to be him.

Overall, AI will be of incalculable benefit to humans. While it will stimulate dreaming as never before, it will also trigger nightmares.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: AI, copyright, deep fakes, films, Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, movie stars, plagiarism, political candidates, Politics, Religion, singers, Taylor Swift, truth, writers

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