Tag: technology

Human Intelligence at a Premium

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment column on the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (11.8.26), beginning what should prove to be a series of arguments against the rise of Artificial Intelligence and its gas-guzzling infrastructure. My comments are edited at the paper each time, and you may spot the changes by use of the word “I”. I don’t write it in the first person for any publication, so this is a glaring correction signifying other changes. The process has been exaggerated since the legal challenge to an earlier column of mine, by Zionists. Ho hum, such are the times, but I can assure you I check my facts and research daily, not once a week!

It’s also never my headline.

The unedited version is below and at my Blog site, or expand the picture below to read the published version.

Stop AI Now!

What is the very worst thing we can do in a drought? Commit to more water use. It’s obvious really. Consequently, we are each told to preserve water, from fewer showers to hosepipe bans. Suddenly water is our individual responsibility.

That is a Great Lie. One of the many of this freshly dystopian era. We know that the water companies who have invested over the past half-century in their shareholder’s dividends rather than our water infrastructure leak a quarter to a third of all the treated drinking water through rusted pipes before it reaches our homes.

We know that industry uses 80% our potable water, only 20% coming through our taps for rehydration, washing and gardening.

Clearly it’s not all down to us.

Yet, in this Age of Climate Change, the industrial corporations supported by government are creating new demands on water supplies that eclipse anything we can manage in terms of water conservation.

The Data Centres being fast-tracked in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) require quantities of clean, processed drinking water as the first priority for the privatised water companies who already cannot maintain domestic supplies.

It is not the private consumer who is profligate. We are not guilty parties.

By 2030 data centres across the world will require the same water-useage as 1.3billion people. Currently there are at least 2.1 billion people in the world living without access to safe water at home, with one in four people without safely managed drinking water.

This is not just an issue for people in the Global South, already reeling from fires and floods. Climate change is hitting the rich North West is suffering too. In the United States, the sudden investment in AI Data Centres, representing the deepening Cold War competition with China, is resulting in these new massive industrial facilities pulling millions of gallons of the precious public water reserves dependent on groundwater, springs, wells, and aquifers that recharge too slowly. The long-term effects on farms, livestock, creeks, tourism, fishing and conservation are already visible.

Parts of the US are not only in drought but in a crisis caused by the diversion of water from agriculture and homes to Data Centres. Entire electricity generating plants have been diverted away from domestic supply to provide the huge power required by these computing hubs, with decommissioned old nuclear power plants reopened. Fossil-fuelled electricity generators feeding these megawatt guzzling computers are exacerbating the climate crisis. Microsoft has released emissions data showing an increase of 25% in the past year alone, matching Google’s increase of 25% and Amazon 16%, breaking all climate pledges to mitigate the climate catastrophe.

The International Energy Agency estimates that a typical AI-focused data centre consumes as much as 100,000 households. Some of them that we’re seeing built are 20 times that amount. Ofgem has reported on 140 applications for proposed data centres requesting connection to the already creaking national grid, together requiring 50 gigawatts of energy- an energy demand that would double the amount of electricity that the UK currently needs to produce.

The lesson for the UK is that we should think very carefully before supporting AI Data Centres. Ofgem has reported on 140 applications for proposed data centres requesting connection to the already creaking national grid, together requiring 50 gigawatts of energy- an energy demand that would double the amount of electricity that the UK currently needs to produce.

Burnham’s government has just appointed a Minister for Artificial Intelligence. The job of Rt Hon Kanishka Narayan, MP, is to work with private AI companies, offering them billions of pounds in tax incentives to fast-track the “AI revolution” here in the UK. It’s likely to be money down the drain.

In North Devon, A data centre covering 850 acres including a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) is set to be twice the size of the largest AI data centre so far approved in the UK. Whilst our farmers will lose their lands and food production, the most serious loss is water access, already precarious.

Data centres not only require fresh drinking water from public treatment centres, they then have to further purify the water to remove particulates, limescale and so on, that can clog the cooling systems of the hot computer chips and batteries. The water is not recycled but mostly lost through the process.

This loss to our public supplies is serious.

There are many, many reasons for opposing Artificial Intelligence, the so-called jobs revolution is another falsehood. AI represents the opposite of human progress. Automated to minimise human employment, the Great Lie of a beneficial revolution for human liberation is best recognised through its priority use for military weapons development, autonomous drones and missiles, AI-designed biological weapons, trojan hacks destroying public service infrastructure and corrupting government information. The so-called jobs revolution is another falsehood – AI offers the opposite, automated to minimise human employment.

There is a growing list of reasons to oppose and shut down Artificial Intelligence. It’s the last thing we need right now. We appear to have given up on human intelligence – all the evidence and information surrounding AI should offer any rationale brain an abundance of proof that we have to stop it, now.

Children’s Rights Are Human Rights

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (16.6.26), exposing Starmer’s hypocrisy once again. This time, the rampant authoritarianism of banning children online. Socialists are for individual empowerment and informed choice towards full self-determination in a society based upon equality and diversity. Not regimentalism and authoritarian micro-management of behaviours. We cannot allow the infantilisation of another generation, bred to be wage slaves and cannon fodder. It does not require us to pander to AI and the Big Tech billionaires in order to uphold children’s rights – we are required to challenge the corruption of the internet in the pursuit of outrageous profits.

The unedited article below and online, the printed version able to read by buying the paper (!) or expanding the picture:

Children’s Rights are Human Rights! (not my headline, but hey)

There are few experiences more painful and devastating than that of a parent having their child die. We want every child to grow into adulthood in a society safe enough to ensure love and nurture over anxiety and pain. Child safety is a focus of any democracy, balancing individual freedom of choice with collective safeguarding from undue harm.

One contemporary example is the required wearing of seat belts during private car journeys. The change to social behaviour was managed over generations with few people objecting to the law when finally introduced in 1983, saving tens of thousands of lives, children restrained in safety belts in the rear seats since 1989. Significantly, manufacturers were instructed by law on the provision and effectiveness of seatbelts back in ’63.

This should inform the debate over banning children from social media. Behaviour change is best managed through informed choice. Children, and indeed adults, are helped to learn safe practices over time – belt up! Over time, such a culture becomes second nature. Making things illegal doesn’t infer consent – explanation and education does.

Most importantly, manufacturers should be forced to take the lead responsibility in providing safe-enough goods and services.

By definition, every law that restricts or prohibits human behaviours is an imposition by the State. All decisions about restrictions to civil liberty are political. They can be made from a position of human rights or from authoritarian control – there’s a broad spectrum between freedom and force.

New laws also reflect the times they are made in. Banning children from social media, by Law, is an extraordinarily authoritarian imposition. It is arguably the latest example of the infantilisation of the population, the paternalistic approach to social control, enforcing passivity. Children should not be taught to accept micro-management from adults – the surest way to abuse, exploitation and servitude. Children should be helped to keep themselves safe. Its called “growing-up”.

The policy headline is to save children’s lives lost to suicide following online abuse or social stigma, a proportion of the ghastly 200 suicides of under-18’s each year in the UK. Perhaps allowing children a louder voice and a receptive listening by adults would do the job better?

By comparison, the social media Tech Corporations will be cautioned to produce safeguards, tho’ their owners are unlikely to ever limit their profiteering or be prosecuted in a way that parents and over-14’s will be. There’s an imbalance to the advantage of Big Tech, these giant Corporations grossing income many times most countries each year. It is a brave Government that legislates against them. Children are a far easier target.

Anyone accessing social media today experiences the insecurity of constant advertising based upon very accurate targeting of our interests, from sports and recreation to household appliances and intimate health conditions. If Big tech knows so much about us, why can’t they be forced to behave safely? How comes its consumer rights that are restricted and not Corporate freedoms to exploit and abuse that are made subject of legal sanction?

Yesterday’s announcement by Prime Minister Starmer of a ban on children’s access to most of social media included the wonderful pledge: “I am not prepared to compromise on the safety and happiness of our children”. Yet the announcement comes ahead of, and perhaps a cover for, more government cuts to frontline services including health and social care – of which the safeguarding of children is a major component – to fund rearmament. Plymouth Child Protection services are in chronic funding crisis.

Across all age groups, children and infants living in the most deprived areas of the UK or experiencing socio-economic hardship are disproportionately at risk of mortality due to conditions completely separate from the use of social media. Four million of “our” children.

Two-thirds of the 3,200 child deaths in England and Wales occur in the first year of life. Addressing the chronic underfunding of our maternity services would be a more effective, money for Youth Centres and recreation would be more timely and vote-grabbing pledges rather than “banning children” ahead of Thursday’s historic by-election.

This is headline-grabbing hypocrisy.

If Starmer really wanted to save children’s lives, he wouldn’t have cut international aid by £6bn a year leaving millions to starve in Sudan and elsewhere. He wouldn’t be cutting the cash to address the climate crisis – the crucial safeguard for all children’s futures. Most controversially, he wouldn’t have supported the manufacture and provision of the armaments produced by UK-based Elbit Systems and others that are illegally bombing civilians and their children in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. Nor would he condemn as terrorists and incarcerate our young people for protesting against such injustice.

Screenshot

There is nothing benign or liberating about digital ID

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (30.9.25) opposing digital ID. Its all about the direction of travel, the vision and goals of those promoting it. Placed in the current political context – the complete absence of workers control or democratic accountability of the tech providers – its a non-starter. Trade unions have to act now to stop the momentum.

The unedited version below:

Never having lived-under an authoritarian Police State it’s hard, perhaps, to recognise why we wouldn’t want to. A reading of history can help: Stalin’s Gulags; the overnight disappearances of millions across South American countries during various fascist or military regimes; Hitler’s mass killings of trades unionists, the disabled, gypsies, gays, Trans-people, socialists and finally Jews… why would anyone willingly accede to totalitarianism?
Of course, military governance rules many lands and people today. It’s one reason for clinging-on to some semblance of democracy, of individual agency. However weak and corrupted, bourgeoise parliamentary democracy is better than rule by force of arms.
Signals of authoritarian control should raise our hackles. The loss of all personal agency, subjection to discrimination and torture without any right to appeal, mass incarceration – these are all potentialities we must collectively guard against.
Little wonder that in the first 3 days after its launch, the petition to Parliament opposing Starmer’s compulsory “Digital Identity App” raised over two million signatures last weekend. There have been street protests since, and the proposal has yet to be published never-mind placed for formal debate. Unprecedented!
In our rapidly polarised society, the political centre decomposing – the old parties of Tory and Labour smelling of rot – both “Left” and “Right” appear to be opposing ID cards. The “Middle”, those who afford European holidays and enjoy privileges to be preserved at all costs, quite like the idea.
For the Left, digital ID systems will ensure centralisation of all personal details, to be utilised not for empowerment but for surveillance, censorship and political control.
At its inception, Starmer has targeted and scapegoated migrants working illegally as the rationale for “Digital ID for All”. That, of itself, is a racist act. Refugees are forced into the informal economy by laws which stop them working legally and make them survive on a pittance, exploited by unscrupulous employers. Starmer’s immediate “rationale” is obviously bullshit, pandering to racists whilst the real intention is social control in a period of mass unrest.
Starmer’s dramatic announcement is actually part of an international initiative and trend for the incorporation of transnational tech companies with each national State. Big Tech is behind the “ID2020 Alliance” lobbying for “Digital Identity for All”. The ubiquitous cameras linked to your digital ID will inform the official observer of everything about you (including your individual key-strokes), big business knowing your every desire and the State compiling your every dissent.
There are obvious links with both the drive to the domination of Artificial Intelligence over our economic and social infrastructure and the fast-tracking of militarisation of our society.
There is a UN-backed public–private initiative advocating biometric, traceable identity systems prioritising “global interoperability and integration with state services and online platforms”, run by the likes of Microsoft and Google. This is twenty-first century authoritarian control with a spin-off for corporate profits paid from our taxes!
The far-Right are in some disarray, those who oppose any State interference into personal Liberty are protesting whilst those for whom power and white supremacy is paramount are confused by the potential. Whilst he’s formally opposing digital ID its unlikely that Farage would repeal Starmer’s ID scheme were he to become Prime Minister, the opportunities to deport people-of-colour being made all too easy through 24-hour surveillance with biometric facial and iris recognition.
The comfortable middle classes console themselves that “if you do nothing wrong you have nothing to fear”. Huh! That all depends upon who’s making the laws that define illegal activities. Laws can be changed overnight by whoever comes to power. An authoritarian state will curb both your financial and personal pursuits, including your recreational peccadillos. You can easily fall foul of a fascist regime.
Total control is the true direction of travel: state surveillance which will be used primarily against ethnic minorities and radical groups, including trade unionists challenging exploitative managers. The digitally excluded, disabled people and elderly people risk being locked out from accessing essential services, whilst welfare benefits claimants and patients will have their entitlements cut-off at the press of a remote discriminatory button. There is nothing benign or liberating about digital ID. We must protest to prevent it before it starts.

We Need to Think Very Carefully about the Use of AI

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.2.25) hopelessly edited to the 600 word maximum on a subject requiring a massive discourse. The Machine Men with Machine Minds proposing a Machine World are in charge, and we’re at severe risk. Its all part of the system that exploits and oppresses but how do we win that argument? The starting point certainly includes demanding regulation of Artificial Intelligence.

A longer (1,000) unedited version below, or just read the pictured article. Thanks.

Apparently the future is AI! Prime Minister Starmer says so, pledging to devote billions in tax money to the bloated Big Technology Corporations to develop Artificial Intelligence (AI) rather than spending our taxes on real people’s health and welfare, emotional and physical.
Listen, not so fast! There are real concerns about this technology. We are in a system where machines and technology are not serving us, we are serving them.
There’ll be winners and losers as AI takes hold, but very many more losers than winners.
The oligarchs controlling the US now are the tech billionaires who are pushing AI. Of course they would. The Lords in their 21st Century castles, their forefathers having owned the mines and oil wells pushing black gold into every orifice of civilisation. AI is today’s landscape, and as with before, it’s all about making money, damn the impacts.
The 0.1% of the world’s human race are deciding how we, the 99% are going to live our lives. Apparently we’ll all be online all the time, living a virtual reality oblivious to the devastation of everything around us.
The bankers and billionaires are telling us we need more computers and taking our tax-money to fund themselves. AI will only facilitate the National Health Service if you can pay for it. It will take your job.
Computer glitches are annoying, online trolls cause anxiety and depression, disinformation makes of distrustful of everyone else and even ourselves. Overall the amount of stuff we now have, stuffed with computer chips, is not creating more comfort or peace of mind – quite the opposite.
And there are even more chilling effects of this supposed new technological revolution. Those in the know are calling upon governments to urgently debate the threats and ethical difficulties.
Self-programming computers are the equivalent of an alien civilisation landing on earth and placing demands, regulating human behaviours.
Computer scientists are warning that AI is an existential threat to human existence as imminent as war or climate change. Machines are teaching themselves to build systems that think faster and are more intelligent than us.
AI is ramping up new warfare, drones and satellites as mass killing machines, all to the benefit of the military-industrial complex funded by, you guessed it, you, in the name of national security or some such nonsense. The technology of warfare is a cash-cow – the killing is milking it.
More and more, we’re wary of technology and with good reason. The Luddites of the 19th Century were not anti-technology, we smashed the mechanical looms because we wanted the assurances that jobs and pay would be protected. Our movement for workers rights under threat from mill-owners greed was responded to by military repression, incarceration and even execution.
We’re here again. How can humans control the machines to ensure they’re beneficial, not exploitative? Humans are not benign, our “intelligence” has produced an observable total power over all life on earth, a power we abuse. So why wouldn’t a super-computer do the same?
Humans can no longer beat a computer at the game of chess. The capabilities of ChatGPT4, alongside its cheap competitors like DeepSeek are so great that they were not predicted or considered just 5 years ago. Making the computation bigger and bigger creates an entity that is all-but sentient already.
AI is thinking for itself, filtering information very fast and deciding what humans need to be informed of. The bots that decide what adverts we may be interested in have invaded our emails, browsers and social media applications, feeding upon our likes and dislikes to tell us all our needs and desires. But they’re not ours, they are the preferences chosen for us by the corporations who have sold our personal information to the highest bidder. We are now each a product to be bought and sold.
Of course, the working class have always had to sell ourselves, our labour, to survive. Now it is the machines that are faster, cheaper and less quirky than human beings who are deciding our worth. AI represents a change in the nature of jobs.
Starmer offers 13,000 new AI tech jobs but this technology will shut down many more “old” jobs and demote skills. There may be more jobs supervising the hardware but the AI will supervise the workers as “the spy in the cab”, the automated “time-and-motion” performance manager. Computers are not replacing the gruelling dirty physical labour anymore, but instead, the thinking jobs. Watch out middle-managers.
The silicon chip corporations have produced many of the new multi-billionaires who consider themselves personally in-charge of their machines, Musk promoting his fascist texts, Farage and Yaxley-Lennon ramping-up racism supported by Facebook Instagram and Tic-Toc.
There is no regulation or external governance, and given the wholly privatised corporate ownership of AI, who exactly can regulate it and has the power to impose boundaries? How can it be regulated?
The AI bots cannot judge what is true and false. Bots put out false information all the time. Your personal and intellectual property is no longer owned or controlled by you.
The programming is not transparent to outsiders – the companies market the technologies as magical, their company the only trustworthy outlet you should buy from. But the systems are becoming self-programming and therefore even the technicians in the companies can’t say exactly how the big-computers work.
The AI Language Learning Models access 30trillion words of data (more than the total words humanity has ever written) and the programs are evolving. General Purpose AI considers missing information – in other words, GPAI programmes think.
In fact we know more about how the human brain works than how these big computers work.
We need to stop the developments and breathe. We need to think before that human skill is taken from us. Italy has banned ChatGBT to prevent disinformation; China has all-but banned the self-programming General Programming AI.
Far from giving our intelligence away to the transnational computer fiefdoms, Starmer should be putting regulations in place to say that robotics should be programmed only to put-out accurate information. We should be able to choose to opt-in to sharing our information. Why would we trust that the corporations will treat our personal information with respect?
In any case, investing tax billions into western tech is a terrible gamble, the gold-rush burgeoning of new tech companies and apps seeing entrepreneurs beating ChatGT with an app costing a fraction and costing the western stock markets over $1 trillion just last week. The apps have us living in a bubble, the government investment a bubble in itself. Bubbles burst.