…when you have big questions…things get…crowded

When the United Nations began holding an annual climate summit in 1995, it was a small and sleepy affair that attracted fewer than 4,000 diplomats and scientists.

Today, the conference has ballooned into a massive gathering of corporate bigwigs and political power brokers. More than 84,000 people have swarmed this year’s climate talks in Dubai, which feature a dizzying array of panel discussions, corporate-sponsored happy hours and flashy pavilions handing out coffee and chocolate.

…but…”interested parties” & “invested in the outcome” can be taken in a host of ways…not least when the host nation would be one example

“The negotiations, we’re not really part of that,” said Marty Durbin, senior vice president for policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “But we do have the opportunity to meet with officials and other companies and dig into these critical issues.”

The chamber this year led the largest-ever U.S. business delegation to a global climate summit. Durbin said the group and member companies met Tuesday in Dubai with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan, pressing him on accelerating the permitting process for wells that store carbon dioxide deep underground.
[…]
“Over the last decade, the climate talks have become a complete lobby fest,” said Pascoe Sabido, a researcher at the Corporate Europe Observatory, a nonprofit group that seeks to expose corporate influence on policymaking. “It doesn’t feel like climate talks. It feels like a trade fair.”
[…]
If the climate summit now has the vibe of a business expo, then the fossil fuel industry might have the greatest number of booths. More than 2,400 people with ties to oil, gas and coal companies or trade associations have registered to attend this year’s summit, known as COP28, according to an analysis released Tuesday by the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition.

The United Nations has not historically required participants in the climate summits to disclose their affiliation with a fossil fuel company or trade group, so past disclosures have been voluntary. U.N. officials changed course in June, announcing that for the first time, representatives for polluting industries would need to identify themselves as such when registering for COP28.

…lot of talking the talk

“People are very serious about the emissions reductions opportunities that exist within their own businesses and want to show they want to be a constructive part of it — and tired of being told they’re bad people because they’re part of the fossil fuel industry,” said Alan Armstrong, chief executive of the pipeline giant Williams Cos.

…probably why they call them talking shops

“World-scale problems like climate change need world-scale companies — like ExxonMobil — to help solve them,” Exxon spokeswoman Erin Szeligowski said in an email. “Put us to work.”

…what is it they say about talk being cheap?

Szeligowski noted that the oil giant on Saturday joined a pledge to reduce methane emissions from its wells and drilling by more than 80 percent by 2030. Proponents of the pledge say it could help curb runaway global warming, since methane is a potent planet-heating gas, while critics say it would do nothing to reduce fossil fuel production in the first place.

…uh huh

Even though oil companies have sent representatives to Dubai, that doesn’t mean they are all following in lockstep. Chevron did not join a decarbonization charter that would commit it to slashing methane emissions.

Exxon and Chevron also did not join other companies in backing a World Bank project to help developing nations stem their own methane releases. U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry blasted Chevron for its decisions.

Consultants have made the trek to Dubai, too. Boston Consulting Group, which is supporting the United Arab Emirates as it hosts the talks, sent 108 employees, followed by Ernst & Young (74), McKinsey & Co. (50), KPMG (41) and Deloitte (37), according to a tally by the Global Strategic Communications Council, a group of public relations professionals who track the climate summits.

While business leaders say their participation has been valuable, Sabido, the researcher at the Corporate Europe Observatory, questioned whether their contributions would cancel out the greenhouse gas emissions from their flights.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/06/cop28-oil-industry-lobbyists-climate-summit/

…worth their weight in…oh…right…but have you seen the other side of the ledger?

limiting the Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). It’s the aspiration of global agreements, and to inhabitants of some small island nations, the marker of whether their homes will continue to exist.

Keeping warming this low will help save the world’s coral reefs, preserve the Arctic’s protective sea ice layer and could avoid further destabilizing Antarctica and Greenland, staving off dramatic sea level rise.

But with the world having already warmed by more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures, achieving the goal is in grave doubt.

…I won’t quote the whole thing…& I don’t have a link within my gift that hops the paywall…but…I’m reasonably certain that if you paste the citation in at archive.ph you’ll be re-directed to the one someone already made…but…short version

Out of more than 1,200 scenarios — some with temperatures rising as high as 5°C above preindustrial levels — 230 paths leave our planet below 1.5°C before the end of the century.
[…]
Next, we take out the scenarios that conflict with near-term reality, leaving 112 paths that get us to 1.5°C by 2100.
[…]
THERE ARE TWO DIFFERENT KINDS OF SCENARIOS that leave the planet, in the year 2100, below 1.5C of warming. One involves a “high overshoot,” but spending decades above 1.5C in such a world is an unsettling prospect. It raises the possibility, for instance, of the world experiencing dangerous tipping points and even calamities such as the irreversible loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

…avoiding that requires a positive negative

So it is worth focusing on those 26 scenarios that allow for only a “low” overshoot (or none at all). Many of these scenarios require the world, by mid-century, to go well beyond the popular “net zero” goal for fossil fuel emissions. Rather, the world will have to be removing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it is putting in — “net negative.”

…there’s guesses, educated guesses & informed estimates…& they aren’t necessarily aligned…but

TO ASSESS HOW REALISTIC THESE SCENARIOS ARE, The Post used a method developed by the Potsdam Institute researchers and their international colleagues to filter scenarios based on the kinds of future developments they anticipate and the speed of progress they show happening.

On five criteria, these scenarios are rated as “speculative,” “challenging” or “reasonable,” in order of increasing plausibility. In judging where to draw the lines, the scientists reviewed existing studies on topics such as energy transitions and carbon removal technologies, and applied their expert judgment to define the thresholds. They also had to remove a small number of scenarios that did not have enough information to be analyzed by these methods (about 10 percent of the total).

…hate to say it…but you know where this is going

When we change the assumption to reasonable for carbon dioxide removal and storage underground, four paths to 1.5°C remain on the chart. And when we look at only reasonable assumptions, there is no path left.

…not that we necessarily have to stay that course

FIRST, IF WE STILL WANT TO STAY ON A “LOW OVERSHOOT” PATH, we can consider what the Potsdam Institute researchers consider “challenging” scenarios, rather than “reasonable” ones. These scenarios assume the world will make even speedier progress on clean energy and carbon removal from the atmosphere.

…everybody likes a challenge…right?

What makes these scenarios work? One common theme is much more dramatic carbon removal from the atmosphere, storing it either underground or in forests and agricultural landscapes. The majority of these scenarios require us to be able to subtract over 7 billion tons per year from the atmosphere by 2050. This will require a huge scale up of interventions like carbon capture and storage, which only has an estimated capacity of about 43 million tons per year today. Capacity has roughly doubled in the past decade, but a far faster pace of change would be needed to achieve this outcome.

Some scenarios also require dramatic transformations of energy use thanks to a combination of renewables and vastly expanded energy efficiency. Many require the carbon intensity of energy use — how much CO2 is emitted per unit of energy consumed — to decrease by over 80 percent by 2050. This would require total or a near total phaseout of fossil fuels, widespread electrification of the world’s energy systems and major fuel shifts in transportation to electric vehicles or the use of other fuels such as hydrogen or biofuels, among other innovations.

…or…you know…the path of least resistance, I guess you could call it

THE OTHER CHOICE IS TO ACCEPT A FALLBACK WORLD in which the temperature significantly overshoots 1.5C during the century. With temperatures expected to be between 1.6 and 1.8C above preindustrial levels through the 2040s, 2050s and 2060s in most of these scenarios, that would raise the odds of unexpected climate catastrophes. But six scenarios allow for such a “high overshoot” and are considered “reasonable” by the Potsdam Institute experts on the five dimensions above.
[…]
“Post 2050, these scenarios are really challenging because they require a very large amount of carbon dioxide removal to return temperature to below 1.5 degrees after a high overshoot,” said Elmar Kriegler, also a researcher at the Potsdam Institute and a leader of the analysis.

All these scenarios require a major takeover by renewable energy, such that the carbon intensity of powering our lives goes down by 68 to 73 percent by 2050. But that is not as dramatic as the “challenging” scenarios that accomplish a low overshoot. The world’s demand for energy overall still grows in the “high overshoot” scenarios, but by a wide range, between 5 and 18 percent.

Not everybody will agree with these models — or, the cutoffs imposed by the Potsdam Institute researchers. Some experts are more optimistic about technology and humanity’s ability to innovate. Others point out that it is easy to imagine countries failing to achieve what is necessary to stay below 2C at all.

In the end, these are simply well-informed models of how the world will work. What’s more, we still have a limited understanding of how the climate system will respond to emissions.

At the U.N. Climate Change Conference late last month, world leaders reaffirmed the 1.5C goal. But these scenarios show that without dramatic action — action the leaders did not commit to taking — it most likely will not be possible.

Or at least, not without a major overshoot first. That is where the world is currently heading.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2022/global-warming-1-5-celsius-scenarios/

…&…I wouldn’t put my money on it happening…but if, say, exxon-mobil managed to corner the market of a scale-able carbon capture technique that allowed for retrofitting at the industrial level with an efficiency that could pull that line down & keep us all from getting hot under the collar…& made ungodly profits in the process…I wouldn’t love that money not going somewhere else…but…however grudgingly…I’d be prepared to accept that parts of the problem could change their spots…I just…don’t get that vibe from those lobbyist numbers…you know what I mean?

Policymakers in Brussels remain locked in late-night negotiations Wednesday to reach a deal on the world’s most ambitious law to regulate artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, senators signaled that the U.S. Congress is taking a divergent approach from the European Union on the emerging technology, with lawmakers raising concerns the bloc’s approach could be heavy-handed and risk alienating AI developers.

The split-screen events on either side of the Atlantic underscore the challenges of regulating artificial intelligence, a rising priority for governments around the world in the year since the release of the AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT sparked a global frenzy.

Congress lags far behind its counterparts in Brussels, where a framework to regulate AI was first proposed in 2021. But after years of work, the future of the E.U.’s AI legislation remains uncertain amid a lobbying blitz and opposition from the E.U.’s largest nations — France, Germany and Italy.

…of which more, anon

…you don’t say?

Government investigators in the United States have used push notification data to pursue people of interest, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a letter Wednesday to the Justice Department, revealing for the first time a way in which Americans can be tracked through a basic service provided by their smartphones.

Wyden’s letter said the Justice Department had prohibited Apple and Google from discussing the technique and asked it to change the rule, noting that his office had received a tip that foreign governments had also begun requesting the push-notification data.

The technique, which takes advantage of the common alerts many people receive when friends contact them via email or text, was used to gather information about U.S. Capitol rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, and other criminal suspects, a Washington Post review of court records shows.

Apps use push notifications to buzz users’ phones or tablets with updates on new messages or alerts. When a user enables push notifications, Apple and Google create a small bit of data, known as a token, that links their device to the account information they’ve given the companies, such as name and email address.

In his letter, Wyden said the federal government had started demanding records on those tokens from Apple and Google because those companies operate as a “digital post office” for relaying the notifications.

The tokens could reveal details about who a person is communicating with over a messaging or gaming app, what times they talk and, in some cases, the text of any message displayed in the notification.

Depending on how users have set up their push notifications, the token data could also potentially expose limited information about anyone who had exchanged emails, texts or social media messages with someone that federal investigators have pursued.
[…]
“Apple and Google should be permitted to be transparent about the legal demands they receive, particularly from foreign governments, just as the companies regularly notify users about other types of government demands for data,” he wrote.
[…]
Some of the warrants are served with gag orders prohibiting the companies from telling the users their data was handed over.

Google said in its most recent transparency report that it received 192,000 requests for data related to more than 400,000 accounts around the world in the second half of last year, including roughly 70,000 requests in the United States.

That data did not break out push metadata requests. But it did note that the United States cited the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in seeking up to 500 requests of “non-content information,” a category that includes push notification data, covering up to 36,000 accounts in the six months that ended in June 2022.

For U.S. requests of push notifications and other non-content information, Google said it requires a court order, not just a subpoena, that is subject to judicial oversight. With such orders, federal officials must persuade a judge that the requested data is relevant and material to an ongoing criminal probe.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/06/push-notifications-surveillance-apple-google/

…not for nothing…but if you heard what one boris “da piffle” johnson had to say about how his tenure at no. 10 was basically just like maggie thatcher’s except that there was whatsapp these days so if you weren’t careful there might be a transcript of how the sausage was made…which is just terribly unfair on a chap’s efforts to compare himself to churchill or some imperial roman or other…not to mention that tosser dave gets a knighthood & here I am trying to remember how the PR people told me to do something they referred to as “like apologizing”…where you leave the “I totally deserve one of those more than bloody davey boy” unspoken…along with as much of your reasoning as (in-)humanly possible & stick to heavily implying it’s all someone else’s fault & that on a narrow enough definition you can just about claim with a straight face that the decisions you made were the best ones possible with the information you had…well…you might wonder how that picture would look if someone had been up on his lines to that push notification extent…but paths diverge

After more than half a year of work on AI policy, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters that the bipartisan group was “starting to really begin to work on legislation,” though he offered few specifics about what such a bill would include.

The comments came during Congress’s last two AI forums of 2023, where lawmakers huddled with top tech executives, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, to better understand topics including the risks of an AI doomsday and national security.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), a member of the bipartisan working group that Schumer assembled to craft AI policy, said the senators are pursuing an “incentive-based” approach in an effort to retain AI developers in the United States.

“If [European policymakers] look at this as a regulatory activity, they will chase AI development to the United States,” he told reporters after the pair of forums. “What we don’t want to is to chase AI development to our adversaries.”

Meanwhile, officials in the European Union sought a late-stage breakthrough on the E.U. AI Act, which would largely take a “risk-based” approach to limiting the uses of AI applications based on how dangerous lawmakers predict they could be.

Representatives of the European Parliament are scrambling to counter attempts by the largest nations in the 27-member bloc to water down the historic bill. In recent weeks, talks between the different bodies of the E.U. — the European Commission, which proposes laws, and the European Council and European Parliament, which adopt them — have become plagued by divisions that have jeopardized an act years in the making. Officials went into the negotiations optimistic that a compromise could be reached, and talks were still ongoing as it approached midnight in Brussels.

If no agreement is reached in marathon deal-making expected to drag into Thursday morning Brussels time, negotiations would probably move to a last-ditch effort in January, after which experts say it may be difficult to get any bill passed ahead of European Parliament elections in June.

“If we go beyond January, I think we are lost,” said Brando Benifei, one of two lawmakers running lead on the act in the European Parliament. “It will be at least another nine months before we could have the AI Act.”

…a lot of tough talk about the chatbot change-up

People familiar with the talks who spoke on the condition of the anonymity to describe delicate negotiations said France appeared to be the strongest obstacle to a deal, based in part on its desire to protect a burgeoning company developing AI foundation models, Paris-based Mistral, as well as other French AI firms. A bid to limit AI in police work, meanwhile, comes as France is set to deploy AI-powered smart cameras for policing and security at the 2024 Summer Olympics and as French cities have already entered legal gray areas by deploying or testing such technology.

Asked about French opposition, France’s digital minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, said that European governments broadly opposed restrictions on AI use for policing and national security, and that onerous regulations on foundation model developers could seriously hinder European innovation.

“There is a unanimous consensus within the council that the use of AI for national security purposes should not be included in the regulation,” he said.

He added, “The [AI] industry in Europe has expressed its concerns that adding too much of a burden on the shoulders of foundational model developers was equivalent to not having those models developed in Europe,” he said.

…except for all the exceptions…on account of their exceptional potential to be profitable & all

Going into Wednesday’s negotiating session, Benifei said the push by France and other countries to allow industry to self-regulate would nix one of the most important elements of the bill, arguing that a compromise imposing real restrictions must be found.

“The most powerful models will become the basis of all AI,” he said. “If we regulate their security and their transparency on how they work and data … used to train them, then we will make it safer for all AI systems down the chain.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/06/ai-policy-eu-act-us-regulation/

…baby steps

Google unveiled its long-awaited new artificial intelligence software Wednesday, taking direct aim at ChatGPT maker OpenAI and claiming its technology called “Gemini,” is better at math, coding and reasoning tasks than existing AI programs.

It’s the latest announcement in a competitive year for the tech industry, where tech giants such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook competed with smaller upstarts like OpenAI and Anthropic to roll out AI products that consumers and businesses will pay for. The arms race grabbed the attention of politicians around the world, who have scrambled to understand the tech themselves and try to set up regulations for it. Throughout the race this year, a debate has raged about whether the technology could harm humanity or is simply just the next wave of innovation that will drive hype and investment.

Google, whose researchers invented many of the computer science concepts that made “generative” AI chatbots and image-generators possible, has found itself on its back foot. Last November, OpenAI, which was originally founded to provide a counterweight to the power of Big Tech in AI, unveiled ChatGPT to the world. The bot captured people’s attention because of its ability to generate humanlike conversations and pass professional exams. Microsoft, Google’s archenemy, struck a deal with OpenAI for access to its tech and began putting it into its products. Google responded with a chatbot of its own. Soon, OpenAI put out an even more capable AI software, called GPT4, which has been the benchmark other companies measure their AI against ever since. Now, Google has unveiled its answer to GPT4 — Gemini. The launch caps a year of frenzied activity for the tech industry.

…in terms of terminology…gemini would be the…engine, of a sort…bard would be the front-end where it looks like a chat-bot to users interacting with it…imagine the graph if you carbon-footprint-ed the push notifications between those…you know…for funsies?

[…]
In a briefing with reporters, company executives said Gemini is able to understand math problems, break them down, and provide advice on how to solve them. Because AI programs ingest data from the internet and build an internal understanding of how different concepts and words connect to one another, they are good at producing sentences, but can struggle at reasoning or math problems. Gemini can also take instructions that come as videos, images or voice commands in addition to text inputs, something that few other AI models can do.

Whether Gemini really is the new leader in AI capability is hard to say. The quality of AI answers can vary greatly, and Gemini, like other AI models, still often fabricates false information and passes it off as fact. Researchers have criticized benchmarks like the ones Google used, noting that they aren’t perfect tests of capability or intelligence. Below are some of Gemini’s competitors already out in the market.

…I mean…they aren’t as bad as the modified crash testing clips they released about that freakishly amateur mess of a cybertruck…but…they share a spectrum

…speaking of which

In November, OpenAI held its first-ever developer conference, a 1,000-person event that evoked Apple’s legendary iPhone launches. CEO Sam Altman strode onstage and announced the GPT Store, a marketplace where people could post versions of ChatGPT that they had tweaked with their own data and instructions. The owners of particularly popular “GPTs” would get a cut of OpenAI’s subscription fees, the company said, a business model made famous by another tech giant — Google’s YouTube. The event showed Altman’s ambitions for building OpenAI into a major, dominant tech company, rather than just being a back end provider of tech to its partner Microsoft. Weeks later, Altman was fired, and then quickly reinstated as CEO of OpenAI, cementing his position and vision for the future of the company. The AI arms race is set to continue.

…it’s a fair COP, guv…sorry…lost my place for a minute there…I’m sure there’s no parallel to be drawn here…probably not even an overlap…everything’s fine & there are grown-ups in charge…responsibility positively abounds…they keep telling us so it must be true

The e-commerce giant has been dealing all year with perceptions that it had fallen behind in the great AI race. Amazon Web Services, the company’s massive cloud computing division, has increasingly been pushing back against that narrative. At its annual conference, re:Invent, held in Las Vegas this month, Amazon finally launched its answer to Microsoft Co-pilot and ChatGPT Enterprise with the release of Amazon Q. Q is a workplace tool aimed at helping staff be more productive by assisting on tasks like fielding customer service calls and creating work documents based on company data. It’s not consumer facing nor available to the public, though thousands of AWS customers including companies like Deloitte and Gilead Sciences can access it for $20 per user a month. AWS has tried to position itself as the more secure, reliable and nuanced option in generative AI. But shortly after Q’s launch, Amazon employees internally reported concerns that the bot was leaking information that would “induce cardiac incidents in Legal,” Platformer reported. An Amazon spokesperson said Q has not leaked confidential information. “Some employees are sharing feedback through internal channels and ticketing systems, which is standard practice at Amazon. No security issue was identified as a result of that feedback,” the spokesperson said. “We will continue to tune Q as it transitions from being a product in preview to being generally available.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/06/google-gemini-chatgpt-alternatives/

…Q?

…seriously?

Why Won’t OpenAI Say What the Q* Algorithm Is? [The Atlantic]

These Clues Hint at the True Nature of OpenAI’s Shadowy Q* Project [Wired]

Unpacking the hype around OpenAI’s rumored new Q* model [MIT Technology Review]

…forget about that Q-anon bullshit brigade for a second…or the way that * acts as a wildcard in truncated boolean operations…which would make it semantically included in the implied dataset…you know…at face-value…which is arguably shoddy to shocking in terms of basic branding…but…these are uber-geeks we’re looking at here…& that nomenclature?

…to quote one jean-luc picard

“You, by definition, are part of our charter. Our mission is to go forth to seek out new and different life forms, and you certainly qualify as one of the most unique I’ve ever encountered. To learn about you is, frankly, provocative. But you’re next of kin to chaos.”

S02E16 Star Trek: The Next Generation

…look…you can tell me they might not have come across that Q…but…disney claimed none of the people who worked on the lion king were aware of the existence of kimba the white lion AKA the jungle emperor…conceived of by a man popularly referred to as, variously, “the father of manga”, “the god-father of manga” & even “the god of manga”…& available in print or animated versions…circulated very publicly…you know…not…directly in california…which is important if all your lawyers are based there, I guess…but…I digress…& the simpsons did it

…anyway…not for nothing…in star trek Q is a god-like entity not bound by pesky things like the laws of time & space or physics or any of those childish things…& is a representative of a continuum that appears from time to time to remind humanity through the medium of one capt. picard that it is in fact still permanently in the middle of an ongoing trial…& will in fact be in that state eternally unless or until it fails to avoid summary judgement & is eradicated entirely with a thanos-style click of the fingers…no infinity gauntlet required…so…I can’t say as that makes me feel any better about things than the various wags out there calling things skynet

…&…I had plenty of other shit I aimed to witter about this morning…but my time is up & I do actually have to do other things…so…I guess that’s where I’ll draw a line, of sorts…& hopefully line up a few tunes before too long?

[ETA: …speaking of lines…it…wanders…but there’s a line in one of these about how they’ll “never be surprised/that they tell you that they love you/while they’re eating you alive” which came to mind when I clicked through on that link of butcher’s…&…as ever…after that it got away from me a little?]

[…what can I say…we bring these things upon ourselves…or at any rate, I certainly seem to?]