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Will AI Displace Climate Change As The Next Globalist Bogeyman?

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

On Monday, before most people even knew its annual General Assembly was again invading New York City, the United Nations issued a press release proclaiming the unanimous adoption of what it calls its “Pact for the Future.” Designed to be a successor plan to its “Agenda 2030” — which the international globalist organization admits is failing — the press release boasts that this “Pact” is designed to create a glorious “new global order.”

Where have we heard those dangerous words before?

The U.N.’s alarmist general secretary, life-long socialist Antonio Guterres, had laid the narrative groundwork for Monday’s press release during a preview delivered last week. In that statement, Guterres – who famously proclaimed the world had entered into “the era of global boiling” last July – advocated for a complete restructuring of the world’s “institutions and frameworks” to address major issues like “runaway climate change,” something that no real data indicates is even happening.

In addition to his usual climate alarmism, Guterres also raised questionable alarm about what he termed the “runaway development of new technologies like artificial intelligence.”

“Our institutions simply can’t keep up,” Guterres said. “Crises are interacting and feeding off each other – for example, as digital technologies spread climate disinformation that deepens distrust and fuels polarization. Global institutions and frameworks are today totally inadequate to deal with these complex and even existential challenges.”

In other words, Agenda 2030, the U.N. plan adopted to leverage those institutions to solve all the world’s problems, has failed. The solution? Why, adopt a new “Pact for the Future” to solve all the world’s problems while also rejiggering all those institutions and frameworks. Sure, that will work.

You would think such an all-encompassing Pact approved by a unanimous vote of the world community would make headline news, but that did not really happen. Perhaps that lack of breaking news coverage can be attributed to the fact that a reading of the document itself reveals it doesn’t really offer many plans for specific action items.

Instead, it reads like something written by the talking points compilers for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign — a lot of lofty language that doesn’t actually say anything.

Nowhere is this reality starker than in the section on “affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy.” After laying out the rationale for pushing the sputtering, subsidized energy transition – as always, painting oil, natural gas and coal as the convenient bogeymen justifying a forced move away from democratic national institutions to change forced by socialist central planning – the document offers only nebulous talking points instead of action items:

  • “Countries can accelerate the transition to an affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy system by investing in renewable energy resources, prioritizing energy efficient practices, and adopting clean energy technologies and infrastructure.”
  • “Businesses can maintain and protect eco-systems and commit to sourcing 100% of operational electricity needs from renewable sources.”
  • “Employers can reduce the internal demand for transport by prioritizing telecommunications and incentivize less energy intensive modes such as train travel over auto and air travel.”
  • “Investors can invest more in sustainable energy services, bringing new technologies to the market quickly from a diverse supplier base.”
  • “You can save electricity by plugging appliances into a power strip and turning them off completely when not in use, including your computer. You can also bike, walk or take public transport to reduce carbon emissions.”

It all amounts to bits of advice, much of which constitutes laudable goals. But there is nothing new here, nor is there anything that is going to lead to meeting the UN-invented “net zero by 2050” target. The simple reality is that demand growth for energy – real, 24/7 energy – will continue to outstrip the ability of global or national governments to force reductions in carbon emissions, because modern life is not sustainable without the use of carbon-based energy. Period.

By citing the evolution of energy-hungry AI technology as a development to be feared and attacked, Guterres admits this reality. He also appears to be admitting that the attempt to displace democratic institutions with socialism using climate alarmism as the justification is also failing, thus necessitating the need for a different bogeyman.

It is all so incredibly tiresome and unproductive.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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Artificial Intelligence

Yuval Noah Harari warns against AI’s ‘ability to manipulate people,’ pretend to be human

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From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

The transhumanist has highlighted the fact that AI has a real ability to deceive human beings. The question is, who is using AI, and for what purposes?

 Transhumanist philosopher and World Economic Forum (WEF) senior adviser Yuval Noah Harari recently warned on MSNBC that AI can be used to manipulate us, having already been shown to be capable of impersonating a human.

He shared the story of how the AI tool GPT-4 was programmed to seek out a real human being — a TaskRabbit worker — to convince them to solve a CAPTCHA puzzle that is designed to distinguish between human beings and AI.

“It asked a human worker, ‘Please solve the CAPTCHA puzzle for me,’” shared Harari. “This is the interesting part. The human got suspicious. It asked GPT-4, ‘Why do you need somebody to do this for you? Are you a robot?’ GPT-4 told the human, ‘No, I’m not a robot, I have a vision impairment, so I can’t see the CAPTCHA puzzles, this is why I need help.’”

The human fell for the AI tool’s lie and completed the CAPTCHA puzzle on its behalf, he recounted, pointing out that this is evidence that AI is “able to manipulate people.”

He further warned that AI has a newfound ability to “understand and manipulate” human emotions, which he said could be employed for good purposes, such as in AI “teachers” and “doctors,” but could also be used to “sell us everything from products to politicians.”

Harari suggested that regulations by which AI would be legally required to identify itself for what it is — artificial intelligence — would be a desirable solution to this potential problem.

“AI should be welcome to human conversations as long as it identifies itself as AI,” said Harari, adding that this is something both Republicans and Democrats can get behind.

What the WEF adviser did not reveal during this particular interview, however, is that he believes speech on social media should be censored under the pretext of regulating AI.

He recently argued regarding social media, “The problem is not freedom of speech. The problem is that there are algorithms on Twitter, Facebook, and so forth that deliberately promote information that captures our attention even if it’s not true.”

Harari, an atheist, has previously claimed that AI can manipulate human beings to such a degree that it renders democratic functioning as well as free will obsolete. He explained to journalist Romi Noimark in 2020, “If you have enough data and you have enough computing power, you can understand people better than they understand themselves. And then you can manipulate them in ways which were previously impossible … And in such a situation, the old democratic situation stops functioning.

Acclaimed author and investigative reporter Leo Hohmann points to the human beings behind AI as the real manipulators and real danger to the masses, rather than characterizing AI itself as a prime danger.

Hohmann believes that AI “may very well turn out to be the nerve center of the coming beast system” — referring to a potential AI system with centralized access to intimate information about ourselves, as well as the power to manipulate or control our behavior — and that in the hands of globalists like the WEF, “its core mission is to eliminate free will in the human being.”

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Alberta

AI-driven data centre energy boom ‘open for business’ in Alberta

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From the Canadian Energy Centre

By Deborah Jaremko and Will Gibson

“These facilities need 24/7, super-reliable power, and there’s only one power generation fuel that has any hope of keeping up with the demand surge: natural gas”

Data centres – the industrial-scale technology complexes powering the world’s growing boom in artificial intelligence – require reliable, continuous energy. And a lot of it.

“Artificial Intelligence is the next big thing in energy, dominating discussions at all levels in companies, banks, investment funds and governments,” says Simon Flowers, chief analyst with energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that the power required globally by data centres could double in the next 18 months. It’s not surprising given a search query using AI consumes up to 10 times the energy as a regular search engine.

The IEA estimates more than 8,000 data centres now operate around the world, with about one-third located in the United States. About 300 centres operate in Canada.

It’s a growing opportunity in Alberta, where unlike anywhere else in the country, data centre operators can move more swiftly by “bringing their own power.”

In Alberta’s deregulated electricity market, large energy consumers like data centres can build the power supply they need by entering project agreements directly with electricity producers instead of relying solely on the power of the existing grid.

Between 2018 and 2023, data centres in Alberta generated approximately $1.3 billion in revenue, growing on average by about eight percent per year, lawyers with Calgary-based McMillan LLP wrote in July.

“Alberta has a long history of building complex, multi-billion-dollar infrastructure projects with success and AI data centres could be the next area of focus for this core competency,” McMillan’s Business Law Bulletin reported.

In recent years, companies such as Amazon and RBC have negotiated power purchase agreements for renewable energy to power local operations and data centres, while supporting the construction of some of the country’s largest renewable energy projects, McMillan noted.

While the majority of established data centres generally have clustered near telecommunications infrastructure, the next wave of projects is increasingly seeking sites with electricity infrastructure and availability of reliable power to keep their servers running.

The intermittent nature of wind and solar is challenging for growth in these projects, Rusty Braziel, executive chairman of Houston, Texas-based consultancy RBN Energy wrote in July

“These facilities need 24/7, super-reliable power, and there’s only one power generation fuel that has any hope of keeping up with the demand surge: natural gas,” Braziel said.

TC Energy chief operating officer Stan Chapman sees an opportunity for his company’s natural gas delivery in Canada and the United States.

“In Canada, there’s around 300 data centre operations today. We could see that load increasing by one to two gigawatts before the end of the decade,” Chapman said in a conference call with analysts on August 1.

“Never have I seen such strong prospects for North American natural gas demand growth,” CEO François Poirier added.

Alberta is Canada’s largest natural gas producer, and natural gas is the base of the province’s power grid, supplying about 60 percent of energy needs, followed by wind and solar at 27 percent.

“Given the heavy power requirements for AI data centres, developers will likely need to bring their own power to the table and some creative solutions will need to be considered in securing sufficient and reliable energy to fuel these projects,” McMillan’s law bulletin reported.

The Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO), which operates the province’s power grid, is working with at least six proposed data centre proposals, according to the latest public data.

“The companies that build and operate these centres have a long list of requirements, including reliable and affordable power, access to skilled labour and internet connectivity,” said Ryan Scholefield, the AESO’s manager of load forecasting and market analytics.

“The AESO is open for business and will work with any project that expresses an interest in coming to Alberta.”

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