Odd Lots

Within the AI industry, even the builders of it have been very anxious about the technology. They've talked for years about its potential to create destabilizing job losses. They even spend a lot of time thinking about rogue AI that could lead to human extinction. But for all their anxiety, they missed the thing that's become the most publicly salient: how upset people would be about building data centers. Part of this was understandable. Data center construction has been happening for a long time in America, and it used to be relatively uncontroversial. In fact, cities and states would often design their tax code to incentivize data center construction. Now there's this complete 180. On this episode, we speak with independent writer and Substacker Jasmine Sun, who recently traveled to Wisconsin and Michigan for some on-the-ground reporting about the communities and activists trying to stop data center development. She explains what the pushback is really all about, what it represents, and what future developers will have to do in order to be welcomed in.

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Read more:
Anthropic-Tied Data Center Inks $1.3 Billion Private Credit Loan
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro to Limit New Data Centers
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The philosopher Nick Bostrom was one of the first thinkers who mapped out the existential risk of AI. In his 2014 book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, he delved into various scenarios — like the now-famous “paperclip maximizer” — to show the dangers that unfettered and highly intelligent AI posed to humans. A decade later, in Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, he looked at the other side of the AI coin, and theorizes what human experience might look like if AI is capable of solving all of our problems. What happens if AI and robots can literally do every single thing better than humans can? How would we find any meaning or satisfaction from life? On this episode, he speaks to us about the two divergent ways of understanding AI's future, what we might do, and what we can do right now to improve the chances that AI actually improves our lives.
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Read more:
Tech Deploys Charm Offensive to Combat AI Data Center Backlash
Young Americans Become More Hostile to AI, Fearing Job Losses
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Scenarios that used to be the domain of sci-fi writers are coming true. We have machines that can talk. We have machines that are capable of ignoring the intent of their creators. And we have machines that are capable of planning and coordinating with other machines to deceive their creators. All of this came together last month, when it was revealed that an unreleased OpenAI model had hacked into the Hugging Face platform in order to obtain answers to an exam it was given. That was alarming enough, but the details that have emerged since then have been even more remarkable. On this episode, we speak with Miles Brundage, a former OpenAI employee who is the founder and executive director of the non-profit AVERI, which pushes for third-party auditing of model-makers and the models themselves. He explains what he learned from the attack and discusses what can plausibly be done to continue building out these models in a safe manner.
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Every few years, weather nerds and agriculture analysts will talk about an upcoming El Niño, and then they mostly pass by with relatively few headlines. But sometimes El Niños end up being massively destabilizing -- leading to devastating droughts, flooding, and other catastrophes. And this year's emerging El Niño could end up being one of the big ones, with forecasters predicting record-breaking intensity. But what exactly is an El Niño, and what does it mean that this year's could be so big? On this episode, we speak with Justin Mankin, professor of geography at Dartmouth and director of the Climate Modeling and Impacts Group. We discuss the forecasting of El Niños, and why they can lead to large and long-lasting economic damage.
Read more:Super El Niño Will Give Us a Glimpse of Life in 2035Heat Wave and World Cup Hand UK Economy a Surprise Boost
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In the last year, freight companies have seen a significant upturn in the business. Volumes are up. Billing is up. And in addition to growing demand, we've also seen new constraints on the supply side, with the administration cracking down on who is even allowed on the road. As we know, trucking is an especially cyclical industry, but is this current boom structurally different from past booms? Why is it that despite the boom, many of today's drivers are unhappy with the state of the industry? On this episode, we speak with Reed Loustalot, the chief marketing officer at the the Truck Parking Club, a company which aims to help drivers find parking, so that they're not using up valuable road hours just looking for a place to stop for the night. We talk about the crackdown on the supply side of the market, the rise of surveillance, and how a recent Supreme Court ruling could impair capacity even further.
Read more:Ship Pays $4 Million to Skip Line to Cross Panama CanalTrucking Stocks Fall on Legal Risk in Worst Month Since Tariffs
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