Get the latest tech news

Silicon Valley has a plan to save humanity: Just flip on the nuclear reactors


Analysis by Allison Morrow, CNN New York (CNN) — AI hasn’t quite delivered the job-killing, cancer-curing utopia that the technology’s evangelists are peddling. So far, artificial intelligence has proven more capable of generating stock market enthusiasm than, like, tangibly great things for humanity. Unless you count Shrimp Jesus. But that’s all going to change, the

Microsoft this month secured a deal to reopen a reactor on Three Mile Island, the site of the 1979 partial meltdown near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to give the company enough power to sustain its AI growth. The irony of all this is, of course, is that even AI’s cheerleaders have invoked the history of nuclear proliferation to try to convey the need for guardrails around artificial intelligence (just as long as the regulations don’t slow them down or curtail their profit-making in any way). But it will take years for many of the recently announced projects to come online, and that means Big Tech data centers will have to stay on the fossil fuel drip as demand continues spiking.

Get the Android app

Or read this on r/technology

Read more on:

Photo of Humanity

Humanity

Photo of Plan

Plan

Photo of silicon valley

silicon valley

Related news:

News photo

Vodafone, Three to Keep £10 Plan to Win UK Deal Approval

News photo

Behind OpenAI's plan to make A.I. flow like electricity

News photo

Restless entrepreneurs pollute the sky to save the planet, animated by the ‘move fast and break things’ credo that permeates Silicon Valley