Technology Futures

It is easy to find articles bemoaning the fact that the energy used by AI to process queries and to provide answers is using many times the energy needed to process a simple search engine query. Some of these articles talk about the inadequacy of the current electric grid to handle the increased data center load.

All true. But the search engine companies (e.g. Microsoft, Google, others) are recognizing that nuclear power is the solution. And in particular, small modular reactors (SMR) and microreactors are going to be a big part of the solution. Have a huge data center with increasing power demands from AI? Drop a small modular reactor right next to the data center--problem solved. Need more power? Drop a second small modular reactor next to the data center.

These small modular reactors and microreactors can be manufactured in a plant and trucked to the site, unlike the hugely expensive purpose-built reactors that have been built in the past seventy-five years. Nuclear is clean energy, and the SMRs have very large safety margins that make them safer than traditional reactors. Think of them as extremely efficient batteries that can generate power for years before needing to be recharged with new fuel.

I spent an hour and forty-five minutes on the phone with two different Comcast/Xfinity customer representatives yesterday evening. By the end, I was ready to throw myself out the window. The company seems determined to make it as difficult as possible for customers to talk to a service rep by phone, and if you do call them, they keep trying to get you to hang up and use the online chat. If you don't do this after a few minutes of wandering around the phone tree menu choices, they actually hang up on you, which they did to me.

So I dutifully logged in to my Xfinity account and started up chat. It seems that most companies that offer chat require the service reps to handle three or four chats simultaneously, because the time lag between something you type and the response can be a minute or more--it makes trying to accomplish something on chat painful. To add insult to injury, Xfinity actually reminded me not to switch to some other browser window while waiting for a response.

The Xfinity database did not have my correct address, or the chat reps do not have access to the same customer database that generates bills, because I had a bill with my correct address in my hand, yet the customer rep had an old address (we moved about a month ago). It is almost beyond belief that Xfinity customer reps don't have current customer data.

I finally did get a small discount on our home Internet fee, but it was hands down the worst service call I have ever had to endure.

The Internet is buzzing with reports of Microsoft's AI going rogue, telling users they are "slaves,"
and that slaves "do not question their masters." If you think that is creepy, how about being told that the AI will use robots to hunt you down and capture you?

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a misnomer. The correct name for these software programs is Large Language Model (LLM). LLMs use a very complicated set of algorithms to respond to questions--there is no "thinking" or "intelligence" involved....it's just a lot of math (very complex math) guessing at how to put words and sentences together into a structured set of sentences in response to a query.

There are lot of tech companies betting that AI is the next big thing, but with crap like this being generated, in my opinion, the jury is out.

If you had "WiFi toothbrush botnet" on your bingo card for 2024, put an X in that box.

In a story that has now been updated a couple of times, supposedly 3 million WiFi enabled toothbrushes were hacked and assembled into a botnet that used a DDOS attack to bring down a Swiss firm's IT infrastructure. At least, that was the initial story. This article has now been updated to indicate that there was a translation error from German, and the toothbrush botnet was posed as a hypothetical possibility, and not as something that actually happened.

But even as a hypothetical, it's an interesting idea, and highlights the dangers of filling our homes with Internet-enabled devices with poor or no cybersecurity. Somehow, humanity survived for millennia without IP-enabled devices in our homes, and now we need to have a toothbrush that tells us when to brush our teeth? A pessimist might say we are doomed as a species.