New essay now online: "EATING THE FUTURE: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop."
AI consumes planetary resources and excretes slop, polluting environmental & information ecologies. It's a new metabolic rift - disrupting the cycles that sustain both humans and AI alike.
www.e-flux.com/architecture...
The AI Summit ends in rupture. AI accelerationists want pure expansion—more capital, energy, private infrastructure, no guard rails. Public interest camp supports labor, sustainability, shared data. safety, and oversight. The gap never looked wider. AI is in its empire era.
Want to read the whole paper? 🌍
"From Efficiency Gains to Rebound Effects:
The Problem of Jevons’ Paradox in AI’s Polarized Environmental Debate"
Pre-print here: arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16548
AI’s climate impact isn’t just about data center energy, emissions & water. The debate overlooks rebound effects—where efficiency gains spur more consumption. The paradox was named by 19thC economist William Jevons who observed that more efficient coal use led to greater total coal consumption 🪨
DeepSeek forces a rethink of the compute & energy costs of AI models. In a new paper with @sashamtl.bsky.social @strubell.bsky.social, we look at the full environmental impacts of AI – both direct and indirect – and what 𝐉e𝐯𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐨𝐱 means for AI and climate. A thread 🧵
Pascal’s Wager
are you wondering what kinds of remedies are being sought in the generative AI copyright cases? I wrote a short essay on this for @lawfare.bsky.social, available at www.lawfaremedia.org/article/how-...
We just released a new AI legal explainer over at Knowing Machines!
It gives short, simple, straightforward answers to some of the most common legal questions raised by generative AI.
It includes our confidence in those answers, more context, and the cases to watch that might change the answers.
