Tag: ‘technology

China Builds a Parallel Global Governance System Ahead of Xiong’an Forum

China is turning its ambition to displace American leadership into an institutional strategy, building a coalition inside the UN while establishing organizations that could expand Beijing’s influence over international rules, mediation, AI, and data. Its promises of equality and cooperation raise questions about whether these institutions will serve their members or advance CCP interests.

A system that places state sovereignty above individual rights could shield authoritarian governments from international condemnation, while Chinese influence over technology standards could promote surveillance and censorship.

CCP officials have announced that China will host the first Xiong’an Global Governance Forum in Hebei Province this autumn and the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Shenzhen on November 18 and 19. Foreign Minister Wang Yi has listed both events among the next steps for implementing Xi Jinping’s Global Governance Initiative (GGI), Beijing’s plan to change how the world is governed.

Xi announced the initiative on September 1, 2025, at the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization Plus” meeting in Tianjin. It followed three earlier Xi frameworks: the Global Development Initiative in 2021, the Global Security Initiative in 2022, and the Global Civilization Initiative in 2023.

These initiatives continue an older CCP ambition. Two decades before the GGI, Hu Jintao called for strengthening global governance as part of building a “harmonious world.”

Wang Yi made the GGI’s target clear when he said “a few countries monopolize global governance” and that this should no longer continue. A concept paper released by the Chinese government on the day of the announcement says the initiative seeks to make existing institutions more responsive to developing countries without overturning the international order or building a framework outside it. Its five core concepts are sovereign equality, international rule of law, multilateralism, a people-centered approach, and “real results.”

The Group of Friends of Global Governance is Beijing’s vehicle for promoting the GGI inside the UN. Nearly 40 founding member states attended its launch meeting in New York on December 9, 2025, chaired by China’s UN ambassador, Fu Cong. The group has since added chapters in Geneva and Vienna. At the group’s May 2026 meeting, Wang Yi proposed nine areas for reforming global governance.

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The A.I. race is becoming a race for power

When Interior Secretary Doug Burgum toured LG’s manufacturing facility in Lansing, Michigan, last month, he wasn’t just checking in on an auto parts plant. He was carefully watching a plant originally built to make only electric vehicle batteries expand into battery production that can store power for the electric grid, a shift that could help America power the AI boom and compete with China.

Good. For years, Washington treated the electric grid like something that would simply keep working no matter how much we demanded of it. That era is over. Between the AI boom, a manufacturing renaissance, and a Pentagon that needs more power at more bases, the United States is in a race for electrons — one that China is hoping we lose. 

AI data centers require enormous amounts of reliable, around-the-clock electricity. Batteries can help bring that power online faster by relieving pressure on an already strained grid and getting more capacity out of the power plants and transmission infrastructure we already have.

The problem is that China currently controls roughly 80 percent of global battery cell manufacturing capacity and an even tighter grip on the materials batteries are made from. The CCP boasts nearly 70 percent of global critical mineral processing capacity overall, including the overwhelming majority of the world’s battery-grade graphite. 

Beijing has already shown it’s willing to use that leverage. In 2023, China imposed export licensing controls on key battery-grade graphite, citing “national security,” and graphite exports to the rest of the world collapsed by more than 90 percent in the following month. A domestic battery industry — cells, minerals, and storage systems alike — is the only real insurance against a supply chain that a strategic competitor can turn off at will, and the Trump administration knows it.

That’s why the U.S. made a point to install a record 18.9 gigawatts of battery storage in 2025, 52 percent more than the year before, and followed it with another record-breaking start to 2026, installing 3.3 GW in the first quarter alone — 54 percent above the previous Q1 record. 

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Will AI Devalue The Real World?

Economic reality embeds many paradoxes, unexpected outcomes that go the opposite direction of what you might intuitively predict. The best example concerns a new innovation that seems to make more efficient use of existing resources. Intuition might suggest that the result will be less resource use but reality often goes in the other direction.

This is called the Jevons Paradox and it is based on a famous debate over the steam engine which made coal power far more effective than ever before, leading to wide predictions that the coal industry would experience a dramatic pullback in production need. Economist Henry Jevons said the opposite: the demand for coal will soar precisely because each unit will become more valuable in the task it serves.

He was correct. The lesson applies in many areas of life. Sometimes that very thing we believe is endangered by an innovation that seems to nearly replace it prompts the very opposite: the original resource becomes more valuable than ever before.

Consider the problem of counterfeit luxury goods. We are talking about Nike tennis shoes, Gucci accessories, Louis Vuitton luggage and bags, Rolex watches, and so on. There is a massive global economy supported by fakes. There is simply no way that a single brand can possibly stamp them out. I’ve been to cities in Turkey where the real and fake stores sell identical looking products happily, happily but at wildly divergent prices.

Economists have studied this phenomenon for many years and the results of the empirical studies are nearly always the same. The counterfeit good does not diminish the value of the authentic good. In fact, the valuation push goes in the other direction. The prices of the authentic thing rise in price, which is precisely why luxury brands know better than to crack down with a heavy hand.

Why might this be? The fake good provides brand advertising in two directions. It gets the name out there. And the very fact that these companies are dedicating time and resources to try to replicate the original only sends a market signal that the original is worthy of being copied. The result is a mad scramble on the part of consumers who can afford the real thing to find it, authenticate it, and brag about it.

The end result: the real thing becomes more valuable than ever.

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AI Authoritarianism: A Government Without Constitutional Brakes

“United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation.”—President Donald Trump, Executive Order 14365

The era of small government is over.

Anyone who tells you differently is selling you a lie.

Case in point: Donald Trump promised to shrink the federal government.

But what if Trump’s pledge to cut the federal work force wasn’t really about eliminating government bureaucracy but outsourcing it to the AI tech sector?

What if Trump, with the backing of a self-serving industry eager to automate government, is instead helping to build a government that no longer needs as many human beings to operate it?

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are disappearing from the government payroll at the same time that Washington is racing to automate the work they once performed with artificial intelligence.

Since Trump returned to office, the federal workforce has shrunk by more than 270,000 employees, the result of hiring freezes, deferred resignations, early retirements and reductions in force.

At the same time, the Trump administration has embraced an aggressive campaign to automate government operations, with the General Services Administration instructing agencies to “eliminate, optimize and automate“ their work wherever possible.

This is not a return to smaller government.

It is a dangerous recalibration of government power.

What we are watching unfold is the construction of a government that requires fewer human beings to carry out its will, fewer human beings to question its orders, and fewer human beings to stand in the way when efficiency collides with legality, morality or constitutional restraint.

That is the real danger of automating government.

Human beings hesitate. Human beings question. Human beings object. Human beings refuse. Human beings blow the whistle.

Machines do not hesitate. They do not object. They do not blow the whistle.

For the most part, machines do what they are programmed to do. Until they don’t.

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Researchers Develop AI ‘Mind-Reading’ Tool That Reconstructs What Your Eyes See

A cutting-edge new artificial intelligence (AI) tool can reconstruct images from a person’s vision simply by analyzing brain scans.

The technology recreates a person’s visual field with startling accuracy and can also predict brain activity by analyzing what a person is looking at in real time.

Professor Michal Irani of the Weizmann Institute of Science developed the “mind-reading” AI model Brain-IT, which interprets functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of participants’ brain activity as they view a series of images.

Irani and her team – which includes Roman Beliy, Amit Zalcher, Jonathan Kogman, and Navve Wasserman from Weizmann’s Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department – released their research on Sept. 14.

While the current study used fixed images, Irani’s lab plans to test these so-called mind-reading methods on participants’ hearing and, eventually, on video.

“What remains especially challenging is decoding video – for example, during dreaming,” Irani said in a statement.

“Dozens of images change every second, while an fMRI scan takes about two seconds. If we overcome all these obstacles, it’s possible that in the future we may even be able to read dreams.”

The study reviewed fMRI scans of eight participants who had viewed thousands of images across 30 to 40 scanning sessions. Participants viewed around 40 images over roughly 10-minute sessions as researchers scanned their brains six times. This created roughly 73,000 image-fMRI pairs for the AI model to analyze.

Irani said other models can translate brain activity into images with “impressive reconstructions,” but that they often make basic composition and color errors.

“The new model we developed outperforms them in reconstructing both the content of the image and its details,” she said.

“What’s more, while every other model requires dozens of hours of brain scans to learn to ‘read’ a new person, our model needs only one hour,” she said.

Scientists have been working on similar technology for years. A paper published in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences in 2017 discussed the possibility of reaching “brain-based mind reading” with neuroimaging techniques.

The paper described how these techniques could be used for lie detection to assess defendants, prisoners, and prospective jurors in court cases to improve the legal system. However, it also notes that brain-based mind reading could have potentially unethical coercive uses.

Improvements in the signal data produced by fMRI machines and in how humans analyze that data in recent years have made this technology possible, according to Kenneth Norman, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Princeton University.

In a discussion with the American Psychological Association in 2022, Norman said the technology could help people with depression or anxiety.

Therapists could use neurofeedback to make participants aware that their thinking has drifted toward negative thought loops and then give them direction to try to control those mental patterns, he said.

Some neuroscientists have heralded the capabilities of Brain-IT’s AI model, highlighting how it could therapeutically help people suffering from neurological conditions. But others have raised concerns about how the technology could be abused to coercively extract information from a person’s mind.

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Federal Judge Calls License Plate Readers a Form of Mass Surveillance

The lower instance federal courts are making their rulings regarding license plate readers (LPRs) – and they are so far coming in contradictory.

The latest is from a federal judge in Oklahoma who has no doubt that the technology is “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance” that is approaching a “dragnet type law enforcement practice” – and that the system is “constitutionally problematic” because it lets the police “indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time.”

US District Judge Sara E. Hill of the Northern District of Oklahoma made this and other points in her ruling in United States v. Kyle, where she said that a Tulsa County sheriff’s deputy violated the Fourth Amendment when he searched LPR systems without a warrant.

The case started with the traffic stop of a Mazda SUV with a California license plate that passed the deputy’s camera as he was parked by the highway. The judge said the deputy followed the car “for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate.”

The vehicle was driven by Melisa Kyle, and the stop was justified as the deputy said she had changed lanes without signaling and was following another car too closely. But before he pulled her over, the deputy ran the plate through two LPR databases, Flock and VehicleManager.

The judge said this gave him access to “more than 50 individual records of Kyle’s whereabouts across the country for an entire month,” and that he had access to at least 30 days of the vehicle’s location information in many states.

The deputy used this information to help justify searching her car.

That search produced about 91 pounds of methamphetamine, and Kyle, 46, of Crane, Missouri, is now charged with possessing methamphetamine with intent to distribute. But the judge has ruled that the evidence was obtained illegally and suppressed it.

The ruling said the search “was not supported by probable cause, and it was done without a warrant in violation of Kyle’s Fourth Amendment rights.” The judge also suppressed “all evidence obtained after Alaniz initiated the ALPR search.”

The judge accepted that the technology has “remarkable benefits” but also asked, “why is it the government’s business where everyone goes all the time? The government cannot go snooping through our personal lives and business without an adequate basis to do so.”

In her ruling, Judge Hill also said that people “do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements on a public roadway” – but that the LPR technology “becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time.”

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Anthropic President Daniela Amodei Created A Stuffed-Animal Advisory Council While At OpenAI

Before Anthropic existed, Daniela Amodei reportedly developed an unconventional method for sorting through difficult decisions at work: she and her husband created an imaginary group of advisers using plush toys, according to the NY Post.

The couple gave each toy a distinct temperament and point of view, then used those characters to consider how different kinds of managers might respond to the same problem, according to an account in The Atlantic drawn from journalist Kevin Roose’s forthcoming book, The AGI Chronicles.

The Post writes that one character, Jinji, was a laid-back cat whose instinct was to lighten Amodei’s workload and skip unnecessary meetings. A pink bear called Maura represented the opposite approach — organized, demanding and focused on details. Another, Beary Bonds, was a panda meant to bring compassion and generosity into the discussion.

Despite the playful setup, Amodei apparently found practical value in the exercise. She told Roose in 2023 that it was “very useful in analyzing different personality types.”

The practice was largely unknown inside OpenAI, where Amodei had been working since 2018. It also came during an increasingly difficult period for her and her brother Dario Amodei at the company.

Daniela had moved into management of technical teams and developed disagreements with several senior OpenAI figures, including Greg Brockman and Mira Murati. Her relationship with Brockman had previously been much warmer — he had even spoken at her wedding to Holden Karnofsky in 2017 — but their working relationship deteriorated over time.

Dario, meanwhile, had his own concerns about OpenAI’s leadership and the direction of its AI development. He became particularly wary of Sam Altman and Brockman and began organizing with researchers who wanted greater emphasis placed on the risks posed by increasingly powerful AI systems.

That faction communicated privately and held meetings outside the company’s usual structure. Some colleagues reportedly referred to it as “Dario’s clique.”

Eventually, the internal disagreements turned into plans for an entirely new company. In 2020, Dario began assembling a team willing to leave OpenAI and pursue advanced AI research under a different safety philosophy.

Daniela became a central figure in that departure, including negotiating with OpenAI as the group prepared to leave. Those involved reportedly referred to the split privately as “the divorce.”

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Privacy concerns put smart glasses under scrutiny as Norway seeks temporary ban

A trip to the park. A day at the beach. A workout session at the gym. All in public spaces where smart glasses can snap photos, record conversations or stream video online — without people in the line of their lenses and microphones knowing about it.

Norway’s government wants to get a handle on both the promise and peril of AI glasses and is proposing that parliament enact a temporary ban on them in some places.

It’s the latest sign of growing concern in many countries about new technologies that are fundamentally changing the way people live. Some governments have banned the use of social media by children and young teens.

Norway’s government said the proposal for the temporary ban will be made to parliament, the Storting, “as soon as possible.”

AI glasses fan concerns — from showers to seashores and beyond

A key question is where to draw the line.

Norwegian authorities say a ban on the use of smart glasses could apply to places where “privacy is particularly important,” like healthcare facilities, or fitness centers with changing rooms and showers. A major focus is spaces where children congregate, such as schools, kindergartens, playgrounds and youth clubs.

But it could extend to public concerts and sports events, plus parks, beaches, museums and shopping centers.

A temporary ban would give authorities time to decide what types of devices might be affected, and debate whether permanent regulation is needed. The government was quick to note that it was not proposing a total ban and said such devices should still be allowed in some places and for private use.

The government also said it was considering exceptions to a ban for vulnerable groups, so that “socially beneficial uses” of smart glasses could be permitted in some circumstances.

Privacy advocates hail Norway’s move

Adam Smith, a technology advocacy officer at Britain-based Privacy International, said Norway’s move was “a welcome protection against big tech’s greedy attempts to extract ever more data, often in absence of any thought for the privacy or rights of others.”

“No reality exists in which people expect to be secretly surveilled going about their daily lives,” he said.

One effort to rein in the use of AI glasses has run aground — in the home of Silicon Valley.

California’s governor last week vetoed legislation that would have penalized the use of smart glasses to record people without their permission in places like changing rooms, doctor’s offices and other spaces people generally consider private.

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Turkish Cargo Ship Sunk By Drone Strike Off Romania, Two Sailors Killed

There’s no doubt that the tit-for-tat war on Black Sea shipping is getting nastier. For several months now, both Russian and Ukrainian forces have traded drone and missile attacks on ports and ships, disrupting vital Black Sea trade.

For Ukraine this national transit lifeline is even more important amid its war time economy. A major incident has unfolded Monday after an alleged direct hit by Russian drone on a Turkish cargo ship carrying grain from a Ukrainian port.

Two crew members died, while eleven others were rescued, and with another reported missing. Ukraine quickly blamed Russia for the attack.

Romanian vessels and helicopters conducted the large rescue operation off national waters, some 20 miles from the NATO member’s shore.

The Saint Kitts and Nevis flagged ship – identified as the Royad Mammadov – eventually sunk as a result of the attack after catching fire in the wake of the initial drone impact and blasts.

It had reportedly been headed out of the Ukrainian port of Ismail in the Odesa region navigating towards Ravenna, Italy when it came under assault.

Ukraine’s President Zelensky laid direct blame on Russia. “A horrific strike by two Russian drones on a civilian vessel in neutral waters carrying corn and owned by Türkiye. Azerbaijani and Indian citizens were on board,” he wrote on X.

“As of now, unfortunately, we know that the ​ship’s captain was killed. My condolences. The fate of one other person is still being ‌established. Eleven ⁠crew members were rescued, one of them injured,” he added.

While Russian authorities did not comment or own up to the specific attack, the Russian Defense Ministry did announce hours earlier that its forces had struck two cargo vessels, according to Reuters.

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“Deeply Flawed”: Biggest US Grid Scraps Emergency Data Center Power Auction One Day After FERC Smackdown

We have been documenting the slow-motion collision between the AI capex fantasy and the laws of physics since late 2025, when we noted that some of Oracle’s OpenAI data centers were being pushed back to 2028 (Dec 12, 2025). Since then the delays have gone from anecdote to trend: in April we reported that half of US data centers scheduled to start in 2026 will be canceled or delayed (Apr 13), in August that more than two-thirds of the power sought for US data centers will never materialize (Aug 14), and just last week the two flagship Stargate campuses hit the wall within 24 hours of each other, with SB Energy delaying the IPO meant to fund the world’s largest data center (Sept 23) and Oracle’s Project Jupiter declaring force majeure (Sept 24).

Now we can add the US electrical grid itself to the list of things that won’t arrive on time.

On Wednesday, PJM Interconnection, operator of the largest US grid stretching from Illinois to DC serving 67 million customers across 13 states, and home to Virginia’s Data Center Alley, suspended the one-time “backstop” auction it was about to launch to plug a 6.8 gigawatt hole in its supply stack, less than a day after FERC ordered it back to the drawing board. The procurement, which was supposed to open for offers on Sept 30 and run through Oct 21 with selections by early December, now has, in the words of a PJM spokesman, a launch date that is “yet to be determined.”

For those keeping score, that is a power auction for data centers… delayed. You can’t make this up.

Recall that in July, PJM’s base capacity auction for 2028/29 came up 6.8GW short of its reliability requirement, the first time in PJM’s history that the entire RTO fell short, and only the price cap kept the clearing price at roughly $325/MW-day. As we tweeted that night, without the ceiling, PJM capacity prices would have been 70% higher at $554.72. A few hours later we added that “PJM is already below the critical reliability threshold.”

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