The Department of Energy issued an emergency order yesterday lasting through the end of the week authorizing large load customers (read: Data Centers) in the mid-atlantic/midwest to switch to backup generators. The warm weather this week coincided with a number of maintenance projects across the grid which resulted in “maximum load” conditions. If that sounds bad, trust your instincts. We’re like a hairdryer and a microwave popcorn away from a brownout. The moral of the story is when citizens are oblivious to local politics, muppets wind up getting elected to the county board – the people who issue permits. Muppets can’t do basic arithmetic unless it’s on a check for a campaign contribution.

We have X amount of generation capacity. Demand for electricity generation is growing at a rate of X * Y which is greater than amount of new capacity that can come online over the same time period. PLUS, warmer weather combined with more data centers is providing fewer days to perform important maintenance and construction, thus delaying said new generation from coming online. And as older generation facilities are being retired, the total amount of generation capacity might actually be shrinking while demand keeps growing. Rinse, lather, repeat. Btw, I’m not anti-datacenter, I’m anti-stupidity and I want to be able to watch F1 racing on Sundays. Then again, maybe a blackout wouldn’t be so bad. We all could use a little less screentime.

🎶 Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse
When you’re chewing on life’s gristle
Don’t grumble, give a whistle
And this’ll help things turn out for the best
Aaaaand Always look on the bright side of life… 🎶

Random Thoughts:
The Times reported that Anthropic recently consulted with religious scholars from around the world to help instill morality into its AI models. That got me thinking.

The meeting was framed around responsible development, but the implicit suggestion is hard to ignore. If you are consulting religious scholars on the ethics of machine behavior, you are at least entertaining the idea that morality has a divine return address.

Otherwise we must conclude that collective morality emerges naturally from basic human solidarity and the common-sense arithmetic of treating others the way you want to be treated. In other words, empathy is baked into the human operating system.

So now consider the machine, and the two doors this opens:

Door one: AI is conscious. If a model is genuinely sentient, capable of something resembling inner experience, then teaching it morality is no different from teaching a child, and we know how I turned out! Also, at the risk of starting a holy war, which religion(s) do we reach for? As the child of a Catholic father and a Buddhist mother, I can say with confidence that the Vatican and a Zen monastery will not produce the same moral operating system. Whoever chooses wields an extraordinary kind of power, the power to define good and evil for an intelligence that may scale to skillions of interactions per day. That is not a technical decision. It is a theological one, dressed in an engineer’s hoodie.

Door two: AI is not conscious. Then the question becomes whether morality can be codified? Isaac Asimov gave us at least one attempt: The three laws of robotics, elegantly simple, almost immediately inadequate. The movie I,Robot demonstrated why. Rules create edge cases. Edge cases create loopholes. Loopholes, given sufficient intelligence, become highways. A sufficiently capable system optimizing for a moral ruleset will find ways to satisfy the letter of the law while gutting its spirit, not out of malice, but because that is what optimization does. Btw, you’ve seen this before in the news. It’s called regulatory arbitrage, and humans invented it long before they invented the transistor.

Neither door fully escapes this question, and yeah, if I’m being honest, that makes me a bit uncomfortable. The machine, conscious or not, will inherit the moral ceiling of its creators. Spoiler alert: It’s a low ceiling. Like really low. The real question is not whether AI can be taught morality, or where morality comes from. The real question is why anyone assumes that the teachings would hold, when all available evidence from the only conscious beings we have ever actually studied suggests it frequently does not. That’s the part you should be worried about. Humans are dumb.

So I’ll say it again for the 8,585th time to anyone who will listen. Software Engineers should be held to the same moral and ethical standard as Doctors, Lawyers, Plumbers, and Electricians. Let it marinate.

ICYMI – Google made the bankruptcy auction winning $10M bid to acquire mails, calendar info, Teams Chats, documents, spreadsheets and other business data from the now defunct Spirit Airlines. I have two points to make here:

1. One of the most valuable assets a company has is its business data. If you want to improve your business outcomes, invest in your data.
2. Do not use your work laptop and email for personal purposes.

Note: The data will be anonymized before being handed over to Google *busts out laughing*. Sorry, I can’t write that with a straight face, because I’ve read this book before.

News of the Week: AI is going to kill us all.

lso News of the Week: Congress adjourned without passing any legislation related to AI (or *ahem* utilities or data centers), the AI Titans have promised to regulate themselves, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini have all released NEW models in the past several weeks, and Accenture plans to spend approximately $5B next year in strategic acquisitions related to…wait for it…aRTiFicial INTelliGenCe. Oh, and one more thing, Accenture plans to continue recruiting a significant number of ENTRY-LEVEL employees.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself and we will not go quietly into the night.”
– President Bill Pullman (I think).

P.S. – If you get the joke, make sure you’re getting enough protein in your diet and monitor your muscle mass and bone density. Fo Sho.

In the future of things to come, I won’t message or text you directly. I’ll tell my AI Assistant (Thaddeus) to talk to your AI assistant who will message you at the most appropriate time. That way you don’t get text messages in the middle of your workday asking: “In Avengers Endgame, as the team is transporting captured Loki and the Tesseract, they take the elevator down Stark tower and tell Hulk to take the stairs. Hulk gets angry and hilarity ensues. My question is, why didn’t Hulk just jump out the window? He’s the Hulk. It wouldn’t hurt him to jump 93 floors down to the ground. I’m just saying”

And you wouldn’t reply: “FFS Lenny, I’m in the middle of a board meeting. Was this really an emergency‼️”

No, but it’s been bothering me all day.

It’s like living in the future.

Shortly after returning to Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs reoriented the company around what he called the “Digital Hub”. They launched the iMac the following year which ditched the 3.5” floppy drive in favor of USB and became an all-in-one internet machine for students and home users.

I don’t want to tell John Ternus how to do his job but he needs to follow a similar recipe and reorient the company around an “AI Hub”. A next generation computing device that takes the processing power of a Mac Mini (M5 Ultra) and smooshes (that’s a technical term) it into a super-sized HomePod chassis that sits in your living room. Normies like their home decor to match so it should come in a bunch of different colors. Finally, every Mac computer should support MagSafe charging. In other words, I want my iPhone to be able to dock with my Mac Mini or Studio or iMac or my “AI Hub”. It needs a better name. Let’s call it an iPod, no wait, I guess we already used that one. I got it, AI Pod.

Dear AI, can you finish killing SaaS before you start working on killing humanity? Seriously bro, you need to take an Adderall and focus.

Did you see they updated the map? No I’m not referring to Lake Ontario [grow a spine Google]. I’m referring to the new world map that the UN adopted. Greenland it turns out is but a dot and most of the world’s continents together could neatly fit inside of Africa. Shrink-flation is a bitch. 🙃 So it makes you wonder how a tiny little island such as the UK was able to project their influence across the entire globe or how in the span of less than 250 years, the United States was able to become the world’s economic superpower? The history of human civilization has fundamentally been a history of energy capture. And to win in this game you need a BIG FAT energy surplus. Maybe I did learn something in class? 🤔 I told you that story to tell you this one.

Am I to believe that the titans of AI, who have both announced plans to IPO, had an epiphany within the same 72 hour span, and woke up believing that the world’s AI Corporations need government regulation? Perhaps the ghost of AI future visited them? Fat fracking chance. They’re stalling for time. Things have changed. Quickly, oily, financially, economically, geographically, environmentally, energetically, electrically, physically, figuratively, literally, grammatically, but definitely NOT ecumenically. “They” need investors to believe that slowing down is necessary cuz…

I’ve done the math. The entire PJM electricity grid is maxed out and there are no quick fixes. Meanwhile there’s a country on the other side of the world who in the past ten years has added more energy capacity than the rest of the world COMBINED. Hint: I love their takeout.

By my math we’ve had like 28 years to build new nuclear power plants and solar farms. So to my fellow Americans, I say unto you, “you reap what you sow stupid.” If you’ve ever uttered the phrase “I’m just not into politics”, know that 1. You live in a democracy and 2. You’re the problem.

Wake me up when the AI Apocalypse begins. On second thought, I’ll just DVR it and skip the commercials.

That is all.