OUR PICKSDoing the Math on the Dangers of AI | The Next US President Will Have Troubling New Surveillance Powers | Zumwalt-Class Stealth Destroyer, and more
· A National Security Insider Does the Math on the Dangers of AI
Jason Matheny, CEO of the influential think tank Rand Corporation, says advances in AI are making it easier to learn how to build biological weapons and other tools of destruction
· One Problem for Renewables: Not Enough Rare Earths. One Solution: Recycling. But There’s a Hitch.
New report includes a detailed breakdown of the metals present in our electronic garbage, and how often they are being recycled
· Zumwalt-Class Stealth Destroyer: Hypersonic Missile Truck or Giant Failure?
Zumwalt will be pushing ten years old once its hypersonic weapons are installed, assuming its current yard period wraps up on schedule. That’s a sizable share of its service life
· Extreme Right-Wing Terrorist Group Terrorgram to Be Banned in UK
The move would mean support for the group would be illegal, with punishments of up to 14 years in prison or an unlimited fine
· German Culture Scene Unites Against Far-Right AfD Party
An alliance of some 4,500 theaters, galleries and cultural institutionssays it sees an AfD success in the June European elections as an existential threat to the pluralist democracy
· The Next US President Will Have Troubling New Surveillance Powers
Over the weekend, President Joe Biden signed legislation not only reauthorizing a major FISA spy program but expanding it in ways that could have major implications for privacy rights in the US
A National Security Insider Does the Math on the Dangers of AI (Lauren Goode, Wired)
Jason Matheny is a delight to speak with, provided you’re up for a lengthy conversation about potential technological and biomedical catastrophe.
Now CEO and president of Rand Corporation, Matheny has built a career out of thinking about such gloomy scenarios. An economist by training with a focus on public health, he dived into the worlds of pharmaceutical development and cultivated meat before turning his attention to national security.
As director of Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the US intelligence community’s research agency, he pushed for more attention to the dangers of biological weapons and badly designed artificial intelligence. In 2021, Matheny was tapped to be President Biden’s senior adviser on technology and national security issues. And then, in July of last year, he became CEO and president of Rand, the oldest nonprofit think tank in the US, which has shaped government policy on nuclear strategy, the Vietnam War, and the development of the internet.
One Problem for Renewables: Not Enough Rare Earths. One Solution: Recycling. But There’s a Hitch. (Maddie Stone, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
To build all of the solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, and other technologies necessary to fight climate change, we’re going to need a lot more metals. Mining those metals from the Earth creates damage and pollution that threaten ecosystems and communities. But there’s another potential source of the copper, nickel, aluminum, and rare-earth minerals needed to stabilize the climate: the mountain of electronic waste humanity discards each year.
Exactly how much of each clean energy metal is there in the laptops, printers, and smart fridges the world discards? Until recently, no one really knew. Data on more obscure metals like neodymium and palladium, which play small but critical roles in established and emerging green energy technologies, has been especially hard to come by. (Cont.)
