Digital Ethics

Catch me on BBC's More or Less podcast talking about all things AI and energy! ⚡⚡ TL;DR? As always - it's so hard to get any exact numbers with what's out there! We need more transparency, more accountability, and more data about AI's impact on our planet 🌍 https://lnkd.in/eHVhQ5H8

The history of technology is full of innovators who got their start creating with their hands. Steve Jobs cites a calligraphy class at Reed College as influencing the design of the Mac; Susan Kare…

Behind the promises of progress lies a simple play: take what others built, offer nothing back, and call it innovation

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Economist Torsten Slok warned that the current AI bubble is starting to look even worse than the conditions leading up to the dot-com crisis.

AIs claiming to provide therapy are providing wildly inappropriate advice, video journalist Caelan Conrad found in new testing.

President also backs US state ban on AI regulation and issues warning to Europe

White House roadmap details 90 recommendations to maintain US AI dominance

Two dozen excuses used to justify ripping off creators in one handy game card

OpenAI’s chatbot also said “Hail Satan.”

For the largest health insurer in the US, AI’s error rate is like a feature, not a bug.

The National Eating Disorders Association took down a controversial chatbot, after users showed how the newest version could dispense potentially harmful advice about dieting and calorie counting.

The Trump administration’s plan, in targeting “ideological bias” and “social engineering agendas” in AI, ultimately enforces them, writes Eryk Salvaggio.

Trump has vowed to push back against "woke" AI models and to turn the U.S. into an "AI export powerhouse," signing three AI-focused executive orders Wednesday.

After a much-needed break, I’m back to “kind regards,” and I want to share something that’s been gnawing at me since before my vacation. I attended a conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa on Digital Sovereignty in Africa organised by colleagues Andrew Crawford Mohammad Amir Anwar, where we toured a data center, my first time inside one. And no, it wasn’t the sci‑fi fantasy of endless glowing servers you see in movies. The reality was more mundane, and more troubling. The place was beautiful, aesthetically, but since I am not talking about pageantry here or interior decor, I won't focus on that. We asked how much energy they were pulling from the grid, and there was a collective gasp when they mentioned the thousands of megawatts. We had seen solar panels on their building and were quite disappointed to find out that they only provided lighting. They proceeded to show us towering generators that, if operational, guzzle almost 500 litres of diesel per hour. We also asked about their water use, and perhaps to stop our shocked gasps again, the staff proudly told us they ran on rainwater and their own boreholes. They then went on a technical run of how the rainwater was recycled and stuff. From the rooftop, where giant cooling towers and rainwater tanks loomed, I looked across the road. A shanty town stretched opposite: corrugated iron shacks packed tight, electrical wires dangling overhead. Cape Town’s inequality laid bare in a single glance: high-tech servers drinking rainwater to stay cool, while people next door queue for buckets. People love to point at the sky when they talk about “the cloud.” I recall a conversation with a friend where I was talking about data centers and she asked: “Why do we even need data centers now that everything’s on the cloud?” I chuckled, but here’s the thing: that misunderstanding isn’t just my friend’s. It’s global. Entire tech narratives have trained us to imagine “the cloud” as something ethereal, weightless, almost holy. But here's the thing: the cloud has nothing to do with cumulus or nimbus formations in the sky. The cloud is concrete, glass, and steel. It's thousands of megawatts pulled from the grid, diesel generators guzzling 500 liters per hour, and communities going without water so these digital "clouds" can stay online. Every photo you upload. Every Netflix binge. Every ChatGPT query. It all runs through buildings like this. AI evangelists call it weightless intelligence. But there’s nothing weightless here: lithium mines, power grids, drought‑stricken lands turned into server farms. Tech Bros have sold us the lie that AI will solve the climate crisis, but it's actually AI that's accelerating it. Just Google how much energy and water your favorite AI model consumes and then come argue with me. The next time someone tells you to "upload it to the cloud," don't look up. Look around.

In a March 2025 analysis, Google users who encountered an AI summary were less likely to click on links to other websites than users who did not see one.

Creating AI that Works for People

A misconfigured server exposed 100M+ records detailing the financial lives of Swedish citizens and companies.

Plus, OpenAI's absurd listening tour, top AI scientists say AI is evolving beyond our control, Facebook is putting data centers in tents, and the AI bubble question — answered?

Trial of technology comes as official report warns existing system has been failing for at least a decade

"They could fix this problem. One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so."

DRIVEN by national digitalisation strategies, rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and booming cloud computing, South-east Asia is accelerating its data infrastructure build-out. These facilities – critical for AI training, Big Data processing and digital services – are now central to the region’s economic competitiveness and technological growth. Read more at The Business Times.

Let's see if an "intelligent" large language model can correctly diagnose a broken 2015 Chevy Trax with a 1.4L turbo. Send us a postcard: Watch Wes Work P.O. Box 106 Fulton, IL 61252 Send us an email: mail@watchweswork.com

The world's race to decarbonise has led to the rise of electric cars - and with it, soaring demand for lithium, which is required for the batteries

A Blog post by Julien Delavande on Hugging Face

Tesla’s former head of artificial intelligence, Andrej Karpathy, who worked on the automaker’s self-driving effort until 2022, warns against believing...

However, as good as AI is at spotting incidents, it can’t put those incidents in a business context; it can’t tell you why they matter.

As the awareness of AI’s power and danger has risen, the dominant response has been a turn to ethical principles. A flood of AI guidelines and codes of ethics have been released in both the public and private sector in the last several years. However, these are meaningless principles which are contested or incoherent, making them difficult to apply; they are isolated principles situated in an industry and education system which largely ignores ethics; and they are toothless principles which lack consequences and adhere to corporate agendas. For these reasons, I argue that AI ethical principles are useless, failing to mitigate the racial, social, and environmental damages of AI technologies in any meaningful sense. The result is a gap between high-minded principles and technological practice. Even when this gap is acknowledged and principles seek to be “operationalized,” the translation from complex social concepts to technical rulesets is non-trivial. In a zero-sum world, the dominant turn to AI principles is not just fruitless but a dangerous distraction, diverting immense financial and human resources away from potentially more effective activity. I conclude by highlighting alternative approaches to AI justice that go beyond ethical principles: thinking more broadly about systems of oppression and more narrowly about accuracy and auditing.