Thank you to everyone who took the time to drop in and read and/or comment on this blog, especially in times that grow ever more turbulent for all of us.
It wasn’t all ‘sturm und drang’. Aside: Much to my surprise (see Wikipedia entry) ‘storm and stress’ is a term first associated with an 18th Century German literary movement.
It’s been quite a year for the quantum science community, which appears to be getting more public attention. It’s not quite at the levels experienced by AI (artificial intelligence). but it’s getting there.
This year I’ve had a lot of art/science projects featured here. It makes me wonder if perhaps art/sci is also of rising interest.
Here’s my 2025 roundup, roughly organized by topic with a (to be expected) focus on the Canadian experience. As usual, some projects straddle two or more areas of interest, so, I’ve made some arbitrary decisions. As well, I’m trying to keep this shorter than my standard end-of-year piece. For anyone interested in the ‘nano’ aspect of this blog, either ‘nanoparticle’ or ‘nanotechnology’ searches should reward you amply.
Geopolitical tensions, the US and its science, and science fraud
Who thought Canadians would be threatened with 51st state status? Relatively mild compared to what else Donald Trump and his kakistocracy have been up to domestically and internationally. By the way, my new word of 2025 was kakistocracy, from its Wikipedia entry,
Kakistocracy (/ˌkækɪˈstɒkrəsi/ KAK-ist-OK-rə-see) is government by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous people.[1]: 54 [2][3]
The word was coined as early as the 17th century[4] and derives from two Greek words, kákistos (κάκιστος, ‘worst’) and krátos (κράτος, ‘rule’), together meaning ‘government by the worst people’.[5]
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Usage
The term is generally used by critics of a national government. It has been used variously in the past to describe the Russian governments of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin,[12] the government of Egypt under Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi,[13] governments in sub-Saharan Africa,[14] the government of the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte,[15] Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro,[16] and the governments of some presidents of the United States.[17]
The term gained popularity during the first presidency of Donald Trump, going viral in 2017 when used by then-MSNBC host Joy Reid and again following an April 2018 tweet by former CIA director John Brennan.[4][18] The term has been used by commentators at numerous news outlets,[19][20][21] political publications,[22][23] and books to describe the Trump administration.[24][25]
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As noted in a posting earlier in 2025 (see below for link), the Americans are desperate for resources, which can help explain at least some of the threats and hostile action toward us and others. The US signed a deal with Ukraine that featured critical minerals. Both Canada and Greenland offer critical minerals and greater control over the arctic passage .Nigeria and Venezuela are oil rich. As for Panama, presumably the focus is on easy Pacific/Atlantic passage.
Here’s my February 13, 2025 posting “Water, critical minerals, technology and US expansionist ambitions (Manifest Destiny).” This is a long read as I cover a lot of ground. Since writing it up and in light of the aggression towards Venezuela, in particular, I’ve come to suspect that my assumption that the US has adequate oil reserves was incorrect. *ETA January 5, 2026: ON January 3, 2026 US military forces set foot on Venezuelan soil, captured/kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro, and announced plans to take over its oil industry. Read more: January 4, 2026 article “Experts say Trump’s plan to seize and revitalize Venezuela’s oil industry faces major hurdles” by Josh Funk for Associated Press on the PBS website.*
Given the well documented issues around US science funding, as well as, concerns that foreign students and researchers may have regarding current immigration policies, the Canadian federal government appears eager to provide an alternative.
“Canada bets $1.7 billion on attracting top global research talent” was published here on December 11, 2025. The programme isn’t explicitly aimed at scientists in the US but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there is great interest in attracting anyone who’s tempted to leave the US.
I often see material on building ‘trust in science’ and material on the reverse ‘battling misinformation’.
This February 28, 2025 posting highlights an event about building trust in science. It also includes my comments about a medical scientific fraud, a bad apple, as it were.
Moving from ‘bad apples’ to an even more disturbing view of scientific fraud,
An August 8, 2025 posting features Canadian quantum companies in a US competition for funding and some sad news, “Canadian quantum companies chase US DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) $$$ and RIP Raymond Laflamme.” Chairperson for the expert panel on Quantum Potential, Raymond Laflamme died about 18 months after it was published. By the way, the Canadian companies all made it to the next stage for funding from DARPA. I should have a posting about that published in the new year.
If you are looking to join up or check out Vancouver and/or BC AI communities, search on the web for “Kris Krug” who is the moving force for these initiatives.
The Phoenix Payroll implementation remains as one of the Canadian government’s greatest foul ups.
This is a sampling of three of the citizen science items here.
“‘Extreme’ citizen science” published on January 17, 2025 was really from 2024 but the word ‘extreme’ had me hooked. Here’s what they meant, from the posting,
“Extreme citizen science is the idea that the role of a researcher becomes ever smaller. The unique and ‘extreme’ aspect is that a larger part of the research process, both fieldwork and lab work, is now handed over to high school students. We were excited to see if it would work and have now seen that it does so exceptionally well,” says project leader Anders P. Tøttrup, Associate Professor of Citizen Science at the Natural History Museum of Denmark.
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Interesting, yes? Especially in light of this next one.
A quick internet search did not turn up any new information about gene-edited pork and its entrance into the Canadian market.
Goodbye 2025 and hello 2026
At this point I’ve decided to give in and accept that thee will always be a backlog of material from the previous year (this time, 2025) bleeding into the next (this time, 2026). In my defence, there is so much material out there I am overwhelmed with riches.
Moving on …
I see that 2025 was chock-a-block with stories about artificial intelligence, just like 2024. I don’t anticipate that will change much, just as I imagine that quantum science and quantum computing stories will continue to proliferate 2026.
While I didn’t highlight them this year, there were a lot of stories about agriculture and regenerative medicine with enabling nanotechnology. It’ll be interesting to see if that continues.
One area that offers some hope with regard to energy and to the environment and I think will become more prominent in 2026 is fusion energy (nuclear energy). For anyone not familiar with fusion energy, here’s a description from the Wikipedia entry for the largest fusion energy project in the world (ITER); Note: Links have been removed,
ITER (originally an acronym for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, and also meaning “the way” or “the path” in Latin)[1][2][3] is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering project designed to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power.
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Fusion aims to replicate the process that takes place in stars where the intense heat at the core fuses together nuclei and produces large amounts of energy in the form of heat and light. Harnessing fusion power in terrestrial conditions would provide sufficient energy to satisfy mounting demand, and to do so in a sustainable manner that has a relatively small impact on the environment. One gram of deuterium-tritium fuel mixture in the process of nuclear fusion produces 90,000-kilowatt hours of energy, or the equivalent of 11 tonnes of coal.[30]
Nuclear fusion uses a different approach from traditional nuclear energy. Current nuclear power stations rely on nuclear fission with the nucleus of an atom being split to release energy. Nuclear fusion takes multiple nuclei and uses intense heat to fuse them together, a process that also releases energy.[31]
Lancaster University’s June 6 2025 press release offers a preview of what to expect at Glastonbury’s Science Futures area,
From climate change to robot surgeons, and from spiders to AI and deepfakes, festivalgoers attending this year’s Glastonbury can learn and take inspiration from an entire area specially dedicated to science.
Based in the festival’s Green Futures Field, Science Futures is co-ordinated by Lancaster University’s Professor Emma Sayer, and provides an area of discovery where people can explore many varied ways in which science shapes our lives.
Through a mix of innovative installations, games, music, discussions and demonstrations, Science Futures will offer a chance for people to find out about the science behind new discoveries. It will also provide unique opportunities for people to hear from, and meet, the approachable researchers tackling critical problems and those behind cutting-edge innovations.
The ‘Laboratory’ stage features a packed and varied line-up cutting across different fields of science and technology, including the ‘science behind the Arcadia spider’, Q&A sessions on climate change with Professor Richard Betts MBE of the University of Exeter and Met Office, discussions around the impacts of AI and Deepfakes, as well as music including a ‘Funk and Soil’ DJ set.
The ‘Futurarium’ marquee will host numerous stands and exhibits including an insightful demonstration of some of the highly specialist equipment used by the BBC Natural History Unit to capture their amazing footage of the natural world. Professor Gordon Blair and his team from Lancaster University and UKCEH will offer insights around the carbon footprint and sustainability of the technology and cloud computing we all use everyday called ‘How green is your cloud?’
‘The Sound Canopy’, created by Lancaster University’s Dr Liz Edwards, will take visitors on an audio journey from deep underground to outer space, while an outdoor exhibition called Science, Not Fiction will explore art’s role in science and science’s role in art.
“Running a science area at Glastonbury Festival is just the best thing in the world!” said Science Futures coordinator Professor Sayer.
“It’s fantastic to see how much people enjoy experiencing and discussing science when we swap the lecture theatre for somewhere like the Green Futures Field. The way we present research in Science Futures fits so well with the vibe of the festival – and people love it!”
Professor Betts will also be co-ordinating Sex & Bugs & Rock ‘n Roll, a decade-long science engagement collaboration, which started with support from the British Ecological Society and has gone from strength to strength thanks to the involvement of the Universities of Lancaster, Exeter, Oxford and Kent and the Met Office. The “Sex & Bugs” stall has been feature of the Green Futures Field at Glastonbury Festival since 2015.
Professor Betts said: “The Sex & Bugs & Rock ‘n Roll stall is always huge fun, we meet so many lovely, enthusiastic festival-goers and have some fantastic conversations about ecology and climate change. I can’t wait to be back!”
Shows on the Laboratory stage will include:
BBC Natural History Unit
Change the Earth Summit (Glasto Special) with Darren Jones MP
The Great Ape Challenge
Arcadia – The science behind the spider
Professor Richard Betts and guests – climate change Q&A
The Nature-Technology relationship with Professor Gordon Blair
Ask a scientist brunch
Beats of Science with DJ Mike Whitfield aka Funk and Soil
Climate songs from Rosie Eade “Folk Pixie”
Stalls at Science Futures will include:
Sex & Bugs & Rock ‘n Roll’s enthusiastic researchers want to share their fascination for the natural world and make science accessible to everyone. They love music and think scientists should be more approachable – so where better to have a bit of fun with science than at Glastonbury?
The Plant Power Station brings the science of sustainable agriculture to life, entertaining and engaging festivalgoers of all ages. In a beautiful marquee, welcoming scientists will lead visitors through a series of games and activities tackling important issues like pollination, pest management, carbon footprints, organic farming, GM crops and food sourcing.
The Circus of Climate Horrors explores the effects of a changing atmosphere through carnival sideshow games offering increasing difficulty as the world warms. Build a boat to float on the Sea of CO2; visitors will see for themselves how much gas is produced by everyday activities like driving, barbecuing, or boiling the kettle.
The art exhibition. ‘Science, not fiction’ will be an outside showcase of art in science, and science in art featuring contributions from 11 artists.
For the full Science Futures line-up – and exciting announcements as the festival approaches – follow @sci_futures on Twitter and Instagram.
Sex & Bugs & Rock ‘n Roll made its debut in 2013, from their homepage,
Sex & Bugs & Rock ‘n Roll brings environmental science to music festivals.
We’re a team of enthusiastic researchers who want to share our fascination for the natural world and make science accessible to everyone. We think scientists should be more approachable and we also love music – so where better to have a bit of fun with science than at music festivals?
Science is all about curiosity, so we do our best to recreate that spirit by turning interesting research into entertaining activities. Anyone can drop by our stall to chat, ask questions, or just take a look around and try their hand at a game or two.
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Although planned as a one-off event to celebrate the Centenary of the British Ecological Society in 2013, Sex & Bugs & Rock ‘n Roll has been such a huge success that we continue to tour UK music festivals with our stall – complete with a live colony of bumblebees!
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Here’s a video from the 2013 Wychwood Festival, from Sex & Bugs & Rock ‘n Roll homepage,
Getting back to Glastonbury 2025,
[downloaded from https://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/areas/the-green-fields/green-futures/science-futures/]
Strictly speaking, this art installation/situationist artwork is not science but the proposition strikes a chord given the rumblings about Canada’s border being an ‘imaginary line’ and the suggestion the country should be annexed by the US. From the 2025 Glastonbury Festival’s Terminal 1 webpage,
In a world where the lines drawn on a map by our ancestors have come to define and divide our world, this is a place without borders that celebrates our shared humanity. Unified by the simple message – NO-ONE IS ILLEGAL.
The Terminal is a deliberately slippery proposition. We are staffed by actors but we’re not ‘theatre’, we play films but we’re not a cinema, we are activists but won’t make you sign a petition. We also sell beer and dance but we’re not a club.
A walk-through situationist artwork disguised as an international airport. It is also angry. But serves its polemic with a side order of slapstick.
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Unlike President Donald Trump, these artists are not trying to turn the clock back to a time of uninhibited territorial expansion but making the point (as I understand it) that we are all living on and having to share one planet. It seems ironic that Trump and the artists are making the same claim about ‘imaginary lines’ while being entirely at cross purposes.
In addition to the competition to develop commercial quantum computing, there’s the competition to develop commercial nuclear fusion energy. I have four stories about nuclear fusion, one from Spain, one from Chine, one from the US, and one from Vancouver. There are also a couple of segues into history and the recently (April 2, 2025) announced US tariffs (chaos has since ensued as these have become ‘on again/off again’ tariffs) but the bulk of this posting is focused on the latest (January – early April 2025) in fusion energy.
Fission nuclear energy, where atoms are split, is better known; fusion nuclear energy is released when a star is formed. For anyone unfamiliar with the word tokamak as applied to nuclear fusion (which is mentioned in all the stories), you can find out more in the Tokamak Wikipedia entry.
In a pioneering approach to achieve fusion energy, the SMART device has successfully generated its first tokamak plasma. This step brings the international fusion community closer to achieving sustainable, clean, and virtually limitless energy through controlled fusion reactions.
The SMART tokamak, a state-of-the-art experimental fusion device designed, constructed and operated by the Plasma Science and Fusion Technology Laboratory of the University of Seville, is a worldwide unique spherical tokamak due to its flexible shaping capabilities. SMART has been designed to demonstrate the unique physics and engineering properties of Negative Triangularity shaped plasmas towards compact fusion power plants based on Spherical Tokamaks.
Prof. Manuel García Muñoz, Principal Investigator of the SMART tokamak, stated: “This is an important achievement for the entire team as we are now entering the operational phase of SMART. The SMART approach is a potential game changer with attractive fusion performance and power handling for future compact fusion reactors. We have exciting times ahead! Prof. Eleonora Viezzer, co-PI of the SMART project, adds: “We were all very excited to see the first magnetically confined plasma and are looking forward to exploiting the capabilities of the SMART device together with the international scientific community. SMART has awoken great interest worldwide.
When negative becomes positive and compact
The triangularity describes the shape of the plasma. Most tokamaks operate with positive triangularity, meaning that the plasma shape looks like a D. When the D is mirrored (as shown in the figure on the right), the plasma has negative triangularity.
Negative triangularity plasma shapes feature enhanced performance as it suppresses instabilities that expel particles and energy from the plasma, preventing severe damage to the tokamak wall. Besides offering high fusion performance, negative triangularity also feature attractive power handling solutions, given that it covers a larger divertor area for distributing the heat exhaust. This also facilitates the engineering design for future compact fusion power plants.
Fusion2Grid aimed at developing the foundation for the most compact fusion power plant
SMART is the first step in the Fusion2Grid strategy led by the PSFT team and, in collaboration with the international fusion community, is aimed at the most compact and most efficient magnetically confined fusion power plant based on Negative Triangularity shaped Spherical Tokamaks.
SMART will be the first compact spherical tokamak operating at fusion temperatures with negative triangularity shaped plasmas.
The objective of SMART is to provide the physics and engineering basis for the most compact design of a fusion power plant based on high-field Spherical Tokamaks combined with Negative Triangularity. The solenoid-driven plasma represents a major achievement in the timeline of getting SMART online and advancing towards the most compact fusion device.
The Plasma Science and Fusion Technology Lab of the University of Seville hosts the SMall Aspect Ratio Tokamak (SMART) and leads several worldwide efforts on energetic particles and plasma transport and stability towards the development of magnetically confined fusion energy.
Caption: The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak achieved a remarkable scientific milestone by maintaining steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for an impressive 1,066 seconds. Credit: Image by HFIPS ( Hefei Institutes of Physical Science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences)
China has made a business announcement and there is no academic paper mentioned in their January 21, 2025 press release on EurekAlert (also available on phys.org as a January 21, 2025 news item), Note: A link has been removed,
The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), commonly known as China’s “artificial sun,” has achieved a remarkable scientific milestone by maintaining steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for an impressive 1,066 seconds. This accomplishment, reached on Monday, sets a new world record and marks a significant breakthrough in the pursuit of fusion power generation.
The duration of 1,066 seconds is a critical advancement in fusion research. This milestone, achieved by the Institute of Plasma Physics (ASIPP) at Hefei Institutes of Physical Scienece [sic] (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, far surpasses the previous world record of 403 seconds, also set by EAST in 2023.
The ultimate goal of developing an artificial sun is to replicate the nuclear fusion processes that occurr [sci] in the sun, providing humanity with a limitless and clean energy source, and enabling exploration beyond our solar system.
Scientists worldwide have dedicated over 70 years to this ambitious goal. However, generating electricity from a nuclear fusion device involves overcoming key challenges, including reaching temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius, maintaining stable long-term operation, and ensuring precise control of the fusion process.
“A fusion device must achieve stable operation at high efficiency for thousands of seconds to enable the self-sustaining circulation of plasma, which is essential for the continuous power generation of future fusion plants,” said SONG Yuntao, ASIPP director and also vice president of HFIPS. He said that the recent record is monumental, marking a critical step toward realizing a functional fusion reactor.
According to GONG Xianzu, head of the EAST Physics and Experimental Operations division, several systems of the EAST device have been upgraded since the last round of experiments. For example, the heating system, which previously operated at the equivalent power of nearly 70,000 household microwave ovens, has now doubled its power output while maintaining stability and continuity.
Since its inception in 2006, EAST has served as an open testing platform for both Chinese and international scientists to conduct fusion-related experiments and research.
China officially joined the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program in 2006 as its seventh member. Under the agreement, China is responsible for approximately 9 percent of the project’s construction and operation, with ASIPP serving as the primary institution for the Chinese mission.
ITER, currently under construction in southern France, is set to become the world’s largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment and the largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor upon completion.
In recent years, EAST has consistently achieved groundbreaking advancements in high-confinement mode, a fundamental operational mode for experimental fusion reactors like ITER and the future China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR). These accomplishments provide invaluable insights and references for the global development of fusion reactors.
“We hope to expand international collaboration via EAST and bring fusion energy into practical use for humanity,” said SONG.
In Hefei, Anhui Province, China, where EAST is loacated [sic], a new generation of experimental fusion research facilities is currently under construction. These facilities aim to further accelerate the development and application of fusion energy.
I always feel a little less confident about the information when there are mistakes. Three typos in the same press release? Maybe someone forgot to give it a final once over?
Successfully harnessing the power of fusion energy could lead to cleaner and safer energy for all – and contribute substantially to combatting [UK spelling] the climate crisis. Towards this goal, Type One Energy has published a comprehensive, self-consistent, and robust physics basis for a practical fusion pilot power plant.
This groundbreaking research is presented in a series of six peer-reviewed scientific papers in a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Plasma Physics (JPP), published by Cambridge University Press.
The articles serve as the foundation for the company’s first fusion power plant project, which Type One Energy is developing with the Tennessee Valley Authority utility in the United States.
Alex Schekochihin, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford and Editor of the JPP, spoke with enthusiasm about this development:
“JPP is very proud to provide a platform for rigorous peer review and publication of the papers presenting the physics basis of the Infinity Two stellarator — an innovative and ground-breaking addition to the expanding family of proposed fusion power plant designs.
“Fusion science and technology are experiencing a period of very rapid development, driven by both public and private enthusiasm for fusion power. In this environment of creative and entrepreneurial ferment, it is crucial that new ideas and designs are both publicly shared and thoroughly scrutinised by the scientific community — Type One Energy and JPP are setting the gold standard for how this is done (as we did with Commonwealth Fusion Systems 5 years ago for their SPARC physics basis).”
The new physics design basis for the pilot power plant is a robust effort to consider realistically the complex relationship between challenging, competing requirements that all need to function together for fusion energy to be possible.
This new physics solution also builds on the operating characteristics of high-performing stellarator fusion technology – a stellarator being a machine that uses complex, helical magnetic fields to confine the plasma, thereby enabling scientists to control it and create suitable conditions for fusion. This technology is already being used with success on the world’s largest research stellarator, the Wendelstein 7-X, located in Germany, but the challenge embraced by Type One Energy’s new design is how to scale it up to a pilot plant.
Building the future of energy
Functional fusion technology could offer limitless clean energy. As global energy demands increase and energy security is front of mind, too, this new physics design basis comes at an excellent time.
Christofer Mowry, CEO of Type One Energy, is cognisant of the landmark nature of his company’s achievement and proud of its strong, real-world foundations.
“The physics basis for our new fusion power plant is grounded in Type One Energy’s expert knowledge about reliable, economic, electrical generation for the power grid. We have an organisation that understands this isn’t only about designing a science project.”
This research was developed collaboratively between Type One Energy and a broad coalition of scientists from national laboratories and universities around the world. Collaborating organisations included the US Department of Energy, for using their supercomputers, such as the exascale Frontier machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to perform its physics simulations.
While commercial fusion energy has yet to move from theory into practice, this new research marks an important and promising milestone. Clean and abundant energy may yet become reality.
This is not directly related to fusion energy, so, you might want to skip this section.
Caption: Type One Energy employees at the Bull Run [emphasis mine] Fossil Plant, soon to be home to the prototype Infinity One. Credit: Type One Energy
I wonder if anyone argued for a change of name given how charged the US history associated with ‘Bull Run’ is, from the the First Battle of Bull Run Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,
The First Battle of Bull Run, called the Battle of First Manassas[1] by Confederate forces, was the first major battle of the American Civil War. The battle was fought on July 21, 1861, in Prince William County, Virginia, just north of what is now the city of Manassas and about thirty miles west-southwest of Washington, D.C. The Union Army was slow in positioning themselves, allowing Confederate reinforcements time to arrive by rail. Each side had about 18,000 poorly trained and poorly led troops. The battle was a Confederate victory and was followed by a disorganized post-battle retreat of the Union forces.
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A Confederate victory the first time and the second time (Second Battle of Bull Run Wikipedia entry)? For anyone unfamiliar with the history, the US Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865 between Union and Confederate forces. The Confederate states had seceded from the union (US) and were fighting to retain their slavery-based economy and they lost the war.
Had anyone consulted me I would have advised changing the name from Bull Run to some thing less charged (pun noted) to host your prototype fusion energy pilot plant.
Back to the usual programme.
Type One Energy
Type One Energy issued a March 27, 2025 news release about the special issue of the Journal of Plasma Physics (JPP), Note 1: Some of this redundant; Note 2: Links have been removed,
Type One Energy announced today publication of the world’s first comprehensive, self-consistent, and robust physics basis, with conservative design margins, for a practical fusion pilot power plant. This physics basis is presented in a series of seven peer-reviewed scientific papers in a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Plasma Physics (JPP). They serve as the foundation for the company’s first Infinity Two stellarator fusion power plant project, which Type One Energy is developing for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) utility in the U.S.
The Infinity Two fusion pilot power plant physics design basis realistically considers, for the first time, the complex relationship between competing requirements for plasma performance, power plant startup, construction logistics, reliability, and economics utilizing actual power plant operating experience. This Infinity Two baseline physics solution makes use of the inherently favorable operating characteristics of highly optimized stellarator fusion technology using modular superconducting magnets, as was so successfully proven on the W7-X science machine in Germany.
“Why are we the first private fusion company with an agreement to develop a potential fusion power plant project for an energy utility? Because we have a design anchored in reality,” said Christofer Mowry, CEO of Type One Energy. “The physics basis for Infinity Two is grounded in the knowledge of what is required for application to, and performance in, the demanding environment of reliable electrical generation for the power grid. We have an organization that understands this isn’t about designing a science project.”
Led by Chris Hegna, widely recognized as a leading theorist in modern stellarators, Type One Energy performed high-fidelity computational plasma physics analyses to substantially reduce the risk of meeting Infinity Two power plant functional and performance requirements. This unique and transformational achievement is the result of a global development program led by the Type One Energy plasma physics and stellarator engineering organization, with significant contributions from a broad coalition of scientists from national laboratories and universities around the world. The company made use of a spectrum of high-performance computing facilities, including access to the highest-performance U.S. Department of Energy supercomputers such as the exascale Frontier machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), to perform its stellarator physics simulations.
“We committed to this ambitious fusion commercialization milestone two years ago and today we delivered,” said John Canik, Chief Science and Engineering Officer for Type One Energy. “The team was able to efficiently develop deep plasma physics insights to inform the design of our Infinity Two stellarator, by taking advantage of our access to high performance computing resources. This enabled the Type One Energy team to demonstrate a realistic, integrated stellarator design that moves far beyond conventional thinking and concepts derived from more limited modeling capabilities.”
The consistent and robust physics solution for Infinity Two results in a deuterium-tritium (D-T) fueled, burning plasma stellarator with 800 MW of fusion power and delivers a nominal 350 MWe to the power grid. It is characterized by fusion plasma with resilient and stable behavior across a broad range of operating conditions, very low heat loss due to turbulent transport, as well as tolerable direct energy losses to the stellarator first wall. The Infinity Two stellarator has sufficient room for both adequately sized island divertors to exhaust helium ash and a blanket which provides appropriate shielding and tritium breeding. Type One Energy has high confidence that this essential physics solution provides a good baseline stellarator configuration for the Infinity Two fusion pilot power plant.
“The articles in this issue [of JPP] represent an important step towards a fusion reactor based on the stellarator concept. Thanks to decades of experiments and theoretical research, much of the latter published in JPP, it has become possible to lay out the physics basis for a stellarator power plant in considerable detail,” said Per Helander, head of Stellarator Theory Division at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. “JPP is very happy to publish this series of papers from Type One Energy, where this has been accomplished in a way that sets new standards for the fidelity and confidence level in this context.”
Important to successful fusion power plant commercialization, this stellarator configuration has enabled Type One Energy to architect a maintenance solution which supports good power plant Capacity Factors (CF) and associated Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE). It also supports favorable regulatory requirements for component manufacturing and power plant construction methods essential to achieving a reasonable Over-Night Cost (ONC) for Infinity Two.
About Type One Energy
Type One Energy Group is mission-driven to provide sustainable, affordable fusion power to the world. Established in 2019 and venture-backed in 2023, the company is led by a team of globally recognized fusion scientists with a strong track record of building state-of-the-art stellarator fusion machines, together with veteran business leaders experienced in scaling companies and commercializing energy technologies. Type One Energy applies proven advanced manufacturing methods, modern computational physics and high-field superconducting magnets to develop its optimized stellarator fusion energy system. Its FusionDirect development program pursues the lowest-risk, shortest-schedule path to a fusion power plant over the coming decade, using a partner-intensive and capital-efficient strategy. Type One Energy is committed to community engagement in the development and deployment of its clean energy technology. For more information, visit www.typeoneenergy.com or follow us on LinkedIn.
While the company is currently headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee, it was originally a spinoff company from the University of Wisconsin-Madison according to a March 30, 2023 posting on the university’s College of Engineering website,
Type One Energy, a Middleton, Wisconsin-based fusion energy company with roots in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Engineering, recently announced its first round of seed funding, raising $29 million from investors. The company has also onboarded a new, highly experienced CEO [Christofer Mowry].
Type One, founded in 2019 by a team of globally recognized fusion scientists and business leaders, is hoping to commercialize stellarator technology over the next decade. Stellarators are a type of fusion reactor that uses powerful magnets to confine ultra-hot streams of plasma in order to create the conditions for fusion reactions. Energy from fusion promises to be clean, safe, renewable power. The company is using advanced manufacturing methods, modern computational physics and high-field superconducting magnets to develop its stellarator through an initiative called FusionDirect.
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According to the Type One Energy’s About page, there are four offices with the headquarters in Tennessee,
Madison 316 W Washington Ave. Suite 300 Madison, WI 53703
Boston 299 Washington St. Suites C & E Woburn, MA 01801
Vancouver 1140 West Pender St. Vancouver, BC V6E 4G1
The mention of an office in Vancouver, Canada piqued my curiosity but before getting to that, I’m going to include some informative excerpts about nuclear energy (both fission and fusion) from this August 31, 2023 article written by Tina Tosukhowong on behalf of TDK Ventures, which was posted on Medium,
Fusion power is the key to the energy transformation that humanity needs to drive decarbonization, clean, and baseload energy production that is inherently fail-safe, with no risk of long-lived radioactive waste, while also delivering on ever-growing energy-consumption demands at the global scale. Fusion is hard and requires exceptional conditions for sustained reaction (which is part of what makes it so safe), which has long served as a deterrent for technical maturation and industrial viability. …
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The current reality of our world is monumental fossil-fuel dependence. This, coupled with unprecedented levels of energy demand has resulted in the over 136,700 TWh (that’s 10¹²) of energy consumed via fossil fuels annually [1]. Chief repercussion among the many consequences of this dependence is the now very looming threat of climate catastrophe, which will soon be irreversible if global temperature rise is not abated and held to within 1.5 °C of pre-industrial levels. To do so, the nearly 40 gigatons of CO2 emissions generated each year must be steadily reduced and eventually mitigated entirely [2]. A fundamental shift in how power is generated globally is the only way forward. Humanity needs an energy transformation — the right energy transformation.
Alternative energy-generation techniques, such as wind, solar, geothermal, and hydroelectric approaches have all made excellent strides, and indeed in just the United States electricity generated by renewable methods doubled from 10 to 20% of total between 2010 and 2020 [3–4]. These numbers are incredibly encouraging and give significant credence in the journey to net-zero emission energy generation. However, while these standard renewable approaches should be championed, wind and solar are intermittent and require a large amount of land to deploy, while geothermal and hydroelectric are not available in every geography.
By far the most viable candidates for continuous clean energy generation to replace coal-fired power plants are nuclear-driven technologies, i.e. nuclear fission or nuclear fusion. Nuclear fission has been a proven effective method ever since it was first demonstrated almost 80 years ago underneath the University of Chicago football Stadium by Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi [5]. Heavier atomic elements, in most cases Uranium-235, are exposed to and bombarded by neutrons. This causes the Uranium to split resulting in two slightly less-heavy elements (like Barium and Krypton). This in turn causes energy to be released and more neutrons to be ejected and bombard other nearby Uranium-235, at which point the process cascades into a chain reaction. The released energy (heat) is utilized in the same way coal is burned in a traditional power plant, being subsequently used to generate electricity usually via the creation of steam to drive a turbine [6]. While already having reached viable commercial maturity, fission carries inherent and nontrivial safety concerns. An unhampered chain reaction can quickly lead to meltdown with disastrous consequences, and, even when properly managed, the end reaction does generate radioactive waste whose half-life can last hundreds of thousands of years.
Figure 1. Breakdown of a nuclear fission reaction [6]. Incident neutron bombards a fissile heavy element, splitting it and release energy and more nuclei setting off a chain reaction.
Especially given modernization efforts and meteoric gains in safety (thanks to advents in material science like ceramic coatings), fission will continue to be a critical piece to better, greener energy transformation. However, in extending our vision to an even brighter future with no such concerns — carbon emissions or safety — nuclear fusion is humanity’s silver bullet. Instead of breaking down atoms leading to a chain reaction, fusion is the combining of atoms (usually isotopes of Hydrogen) into heavier elements which also results in energy release / heat generation [7]. Like fission, fusion can be designed to be a continuous energy source that can serve as a permanent backbone to the power grid. It is extremely energy dense, with 1 kg of fusion fuel producing the same amount of energy as 1,000,000 kg of coal, and it is inherently fail-safe with no long-term radioactive waste.
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As a concept, if fusion is a silver bullet to answer humanity’s energy transformation needs, then why haven’t we done so already? The appeal seems so obvious, what’s the hold up? Simply put, nuclear fusion is hard for the very same reason the process is inherently safe. Atoms in the process must have enough energy to overcome electrostatic repulsive forces between the two positive charges of their nuclei to fuse. The key figure of merit to evaluate fusion is the so-called “Lawson Triple Product.” Essentially, this means in order to generate energy by fusion more than the rate of energy oss to the environment, the nuclei must be very close together (as represented by n — the plasma density), kept at a high enough temperature (as represented by T — temperature), and for long enough time to sustain fusion (as represented by τ — the confinement time). The triple product required to achieve fusion “ignition” (the state where the rate of energy production is higher than the rate of loss) depends on the fuel type and occurs within a plasma state. A deuterium and tritium (D-T) system has the lowest Lawson Triple product requirement, where fusion can achieve a viable threshold for ignition when the density of the fuel atoms, n, multiplied by the fuel temperature, T, multiplied by the confinement time, τ, is greater than 5×10²¹ (nTτ > 5×10²¹ keV-s/m³) [8–9]. For context, the temperature alone in this scenario must be higher than 100-million degrees Celsius.
Figure 2. (Left) Conceptual illustration of a fusion reaction with Deuterium (²H) and Tritium (³H) forming an Alpha particle (⁴He) and free neutron along with energy released as heat (Right). To initiate fusion, repelling electrostatic charge must be overcome via conditions meeting the minimum Lawson Triple Product threshold
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Tosukhowong’s August 31, 2023 article provides a good overview keeping in mind that it is slanted to justify TDK’s investment in Type One Energy.
Why a Vancouver, Canada office?
As for Type One Energy’s Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada) connection, I was reminded of General Fusion, a local fusion energy company while speculating about the connection. First speculative question: could Type One Energy’s presence in Canada allow it to access Canadian government funds for its research? Second speculative question: do they want to have access to people who might hesitate to move to the US or might want to move out of the US but would move to Canada?
The US is currently in an unstable state as suggested in this April 3, 2025 opinion piece by Les Leyne for vancouverisawsome.com
Les Leyne: Trump’s incoherence makes responding to tariff wall tricky
Trump’s announcement was so incoherent that much of the rest of the world had to scramble to grasp even the basic details
B.C. officials were guarded Wednesday [April 2, 2025] about the impact on Canada of the tariff wall U.S. President Donald Trump erected around the U.S., but it appears it could have been worse.
Trump’s announcement was so incoherent that much of the rest of the world had to scramble to grasp even the basic details. So cabinet ministers begged for more time to check the impacts.
“It’s still very uncertain,” said Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon, who chairs the “war room” committee responsible for countering tariff threats. “It’s hard to make sense from President Trump’s speech.” [emphasis mine]
Kahlon said the challenge is that tariff policies change hour by hour, “and anything can happen.”
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On April 2, 2025 US President Donald Trump announced tariffs (then paused some of the tariffs on April 9, 2025) and some of the targets seemed a bit odd, from an April 2, 2025 article by Alex Galbraith for salon.com, Note: Links have been removed,
“Trade war with penguins”: Trump places 10% tariff on uninhabited Antarctic islands
Planned tariffs shared by the White House included a 10% duty on imports from the barren Heard and McDonald Islands
For once in his life, Donald Trump underpromised and over-delivered.
The president announced a 10% duty on all imports on Wednesday [April 2, 2025], along with a raft of reciprocal tariffs on U.S. trading partners. An extensive graphic released by the White House showed how far Trump was willing to take his tit-for-tat trade war, including a shocking levy of 10% on all imports from the Heard and McDonald Islands.
If you haven’t heard of this powerhouse of global trade and territory of Australia, you aren’t alone. Few have outside of Antarctic researchers and seals. These extremely remote islands about 1,000 miles north of Antarctica consist mostly of barren tundra. They’re also entirely uninhabited.
The news that we were starting a trade war with penguins spread quickly after Trump’s announcement. …
U.S. stock futures crumbled following the news of Trump’s widespread tariffs. Dow futures fell by nearly 1,000 points while NASDAQ and S&P futures fell by 3 to 4%. American companies’ stock values rapidly tumbled after the announcement, with large retail importers seeing significant losses. …
No word from the penguins about the ‘pause’. I’m assuming Donald Trump’s next book will be titled, “The art of negotiating trade deals with penguins.” Can’t wait to read it.
(Perhaps someone should tell him there are no penguins in the Arctic so he can’t bypass Canadians or Greenlanders to make a deal.)
Now for the local story.
General Fusion
There’ve been two recent developments at General Fusion. Most recently, an April 2, 2025 General Fusion news release announces a new hire, Note: Links have been removed,
Bob Smith is joining General Fusion as a strategic advisor. Smith brings more than 35 years of experience developing, scaling, and launching world-changing technologies, including spearheading new products and innovation in the aerospace industry at United Space Alliance, Sandia Labs, and Honeywell before serving as CEO of Blue Origin. He joins General Fusion as the company’s Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) fusion demonstration begins operations and progresses toward transformative technical milestones on the path to commercialization.
“I’ve been watching the fusion energy industry closely for my entire career. Fusion is the last energy source humanity will ever need, and I believe its impact as a zero-carbon energy source will transform the global energy supply at the time needed to fight the worst consequences of climate change,” said Smith. “I am thrilled to work with General Fusion. Their novel approach has inherent and distinctive benefits for the generation of commercially competitive fusion power. It’s exciting to join at a time when the team is about to demonstrate the fundamental physics behind their system and move to scaling up to a pilot plant.”
The LM26 program marks a significant step towards commercialization, as the company’s unique Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) approach makes the path to powering the grid with fusion energy more straightforward than other technologies—because it practically addresses barriers to fusion commercialization, such as neutron material degradation, sustainable fuel production, and efficient energy extraction. As a strategic advisor, Smith will leverage his experience advancing game-changing technologies to help guide General Fusion’s technology development and strategic growth.
“Bob’s insights and experience will be invaluable as we execute the LM26 program and look beyond it to propel our practical technology to powering the grid by the mid-2030s,” said Greg Twinney, CEO, General Fusion. “We are grateful for his commitment of his in-demand time and expertise to our mission and look forward to working together to make fusion power a reality!”
About Bob Smith:
Bob is an experienced business leader in the aerospace and defense industry with extensive technical and operational expertise across the sector. He worked at and managed federal labs, led developments at a large government contractor, grew businesses at a Fortune 100 multinational, and scaled up a launch and space systems startup. Bob also has extensive international experience and has worked with suppliers and OEMs in all the major aerospace regions, including establishing new sites and factories in Europe, India, China, and Puerto Rico.
Bob’s prior leadership roles include Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Blue Origin, President of Mechanical Systems & Components at Honeywell Aerospace, Chief Technology Officer at Honeywell Aerospace, Chairman of NTESS (Sandia Labs), and Executive Director of Space Shuttle Upgrades at United Space Alliance.
Bob holds a Bachelor of Science degree in aerospace engineering from Texas A&M, a Master of Science degree in engineering/applied mathematics from Brown University, a doctorate from the University of Texas in aerospace engineering, and a business degree from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Bob is also a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and an Academician in the International Academy of Astronautics.
Quick Facts:
Fusion energy is the ultimate clean energy solution—it is the energy source that powers the sun and stars. Fusion is the process by which two light nuclei merge to form a heavier one, producing a massive amount of energy.
General Fusion’s Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology is designed to scale for cost-efficient power plants. It uses mechanical compression to create fusion conditions in short pulses, eliminating the need for expensive lasers or superconducting magnets. An MTF power plant is designed to produce its own fuel and inherently includes a method to extract the energy and put it to work.
Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) is a world-first Magnetized Target Fusion demonstration. Launched, designed, and assembled in just 16 months, the machine is now forming magnetized plasmas regularly at 50 per cent commercial scale. It is advancing towards a series of results that will demonstrate MTF in a commercially relevant way: 10 million degrees Celsius (1 keV), 100 million degrees Celsius (10 keV), and scientific breakeven equivalent (100% Lawson).
About General Fusion General Fusion is pursuing a fast and practical approach to commercial fusion energy and is headquartered in Richmond, Canada. The company was established in 2002 and is funded by a global syndicate of leading energy venture capital firms, industry leaders, and technology pioneers. Learn more at www.generalfusion.com.
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Bob Smith and Blue Origin: things did not go well
Sometimes you end up in a job and things do not work out well and that seems to have been the case at Blue Origin according to a September 25, 2023 article by Eric Berger for Ars Tecnica,
After six years of running Blue Origin, Bob Smith announced in a company-wide email on Monday that he will be “stepping aside” as chief executive of the space company founded by Jeff Bezos.
“It has been my privilege to be part of this great team, and I am confident that Blue Origin’s greatest achievements are still ahead of us,” Smith wrote in an email. “We’ve rapidly scaled this company from its prototyping and research roots to a large, prominent space business.”
Shortly after Smith’s email, a Blue Origin spokesperson said the company’s new chief executive will be Dave Limp, who stepped down as Amazon’s vice president of devices and services last month.
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To put things politely, Smith has had a rocky tenure as Blue Origin’s chief executive. After being personally vetted and hired by Bezos, Smith took over from Rob Meyerson in 2017. The Honeywell engineer was given a mandate to transform Blue Origin into a large and profitable space business.
He did succeed in growing Blue Origin. The company had about 1,500 employees when Smith arrived, and the company now employs nearly 11,000 people. But he has been significantly late on a number of key programs, including the BE-4 rocket engine and the New Glenn rocket.
As a space reporter, I have spoken with dozens of current and former Blue Origin employees, and virtually none of them have had anything positive to say about Smith’s tenure as chief executive. I asked one current employee about the hiring of Limp on Monday afternoon, and their response was, “Anything is better than Bob.”
Although it is very far from an exact barometer, Smith has received consistently low ratings on Glassdoor for his performance as chief executive of Blue Origin. And two years ago, a group of current and former Blue Origin employees wrote a blistering letter about the company under Smith. “In our experience, Blue Origin’s culture sits on a foundation that ignores the plight of our planet, turns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns, and silences those who seek to correct wrongs,” the essay authors wrote.
With any corporate culture, there will be growing pains, of course. But Smith brought a traditional aerospace mindset into a company that had hitherto been guided by a new space vision, leading to a high turnover rate. And Blue Origin remains significantly underwater, financially. It is likely that Bezos is still providing about $2 billion a year to support the company’s cash needs.
Crucially, as Blue Origin meandered under Smith’s tenure, SpaceX soared, launching hundreds of rockets and thousands of satellites. Smith, clearly, was not the leader Blue Origin needed to make the company more competitive with SpaceX in launch and other spaceflight activities. It became something of a parlor game in the space industry to guess when Bezos would finally get around to firing Smith.
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On the technical front, a March 27, 2025 General Fusion news release announces “Peer-reviewed publication confirms General Fusion achieved plasma energy confinement time required for its LM26 large-scale fusion machine,” Note: Links have been removed,
New results published in Nuclear Fusionconfirm General Fusion successfully created magnetized plasmas that achieved energy confinement times exceeding 10 milliseconds. The published energy confinement time results were achieved on General Fusion’s PI3 plasma injector — the world’s largest and most powerful plasma injector of its kind. Commissioned in 2017, PI3 formed approximately 20,000 plasmas in a machine of 50 per cent commercial scale. The plasma injector is now integrated into General Fusion’s Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) — a world-first Magnetized Target Fusion demonstration tracking toward game-changing technical milestones that will advance the company’s ultimate mission: generating zero-carbon fusion energy for the grid in the next decade.
The 10-millisecond energy confinement time is the duration required to compress plasmas in LM26 to achieve key temperature thresholds of 1 keV, 10 keV, and, ultimately, scientific breakeven equivalent (100% Lawson). These results were imperative to de-risking LM26. The demonstration machine is now forming plasmas regularly, and the company is optimizing its plasma performance in preparation for compressing plasmas to create fusion and heating from compression.
Key Findings:
The plasma injector now integrated into General Fusion’s LM26 achieved energy confinement times exceeding 10 milliseconds, the pre-compression confinement time required for LM26’s targeted technical milestones. These results were achieved without requiring active magnetic stabilization or auxiliary heating. This means the results were achieved without superconducting magnets, demonstrating the company’s cost-effective approach.
The plasma’s energy confinement time improved when the plasma injector vessel was coated with natural lithium. A key differentiator in General Fusion’s commercial approach is its use of a liquid lithium wall to compress plasmas during compression. In addition to the confinement time advantages shown in this paper, the liquid lithium wall will also protect a commercial MTF machine from neutron damage, enable the machine to breed its own fuel, and provide an efficient method for extracting energy from the machine.
The maximum energy confinement time achieved by PI3 was approximately 12 milliseconds. The machine’s maximum plasma density was approximately 6×1019 m-3, and maximum plasma temperatures exceeded 400 eV. These strong pre-compression results support LM26’s transformative targets.
Quotes:
“LM26 is designed to achieve a series of results that will demonstrate MTF in a commercially relevant way. Following LM26’s results, our unique approach makes the path to powering the grid with fusion energy more straightforward than other technologies because we have front-loaded the work to address the barriers to commercialization.”
Dr. Michel Laberge Founder and Chief Science Officer
“For over 16 years, I have worked hand in hand with Michel to advance General Fusion’s practical technology. This company is entrepreneurial at its core. We pride ourselves on building real machines that get results that matter, and I’m thrilled to have the achievements recognized in Nuclear Fusion.”
Mike Donaldson Senior Vice President, Technology Development
For anyone curious about General Fusion, I have a brief overview and history of the company and their particular approach to fusion energy in my February 6, 2024 posting (scroll down to ‘The Canadians’).
On the heels of an new executive order (March 1, 2025) by Donald Trump declaring English to be the official language of the US, a March 6, 2025 Lost Women of Science news release (received via email) announces a new bilingual podcast series being launched during Women’s History Month (March 2025),
March is Women’s History Month and, not coincidentally, on March 13 we will launch our new five-part season: The Extraordinary Life and Tragic Death of Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo. We’re also doing something new: the season will be available in both English and Spanish, and is narrated by “Orange is the New Black” star and Dominican Republic national, Laura Gómez. See Laura below with Evangelina’s statue at Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo.
Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo was the first female doctor in the Dominican Republic. Born into poverty and abandoned by her parents, Evangelina was raised by her grandmother. As a child she sold candy on the streets to make ends meet. Evangelina’s drive and compassion earned her supporters who helped her graduate from Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo. She even made it to Paris to pursue her medical education. Upon her return to the Dominican Republic, she set up a maternity clinic and free milk distribution for the poor; and she promoted sexual health education. But, in the end, like so many, she was persecuted by the Trujillo dictatorship.
Listen throughout March and into April to hear this moving story. Click the buttons below to listen to the trailer in English or Spanish.
In February [2025], FeedSpot, a podcast platform, ranked us as the best Women in Science podcast and second-best California Science podcast. We also got a boost on February 11th, International Day for Women and Girls in Science, when Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Meta and of Lean In fame, shared our stories on her social media. It’s fantastic to see so many people joining us on this mission.
In case you missed it…
Lady Tan’s Circle of Women Bestselling author Lisa See and Chinese medicine scholar Lorraine Wilcox joined us for Lost Women of Science Conversations in February [2025]. Together with our host Carol Sutton Lewis, they explored how Lisa came to write her latest novel, Lady Tan’s Circle of Women. Lorraine translated the real-life textbook that Lady Tan published in 1511, detailing her medical practices as a female doctor during the Ming Dynasty. Find out how fact meets fiction and how this almost forgotten woman of science is now immortalized in a story of filial piety, friendships, and of course, medical science.
Marthe Gautier Our two-part series, released in January [2025], delves into the life of Marthe Gautier, the French cytogeneticist and physician who played a pivotal role in identifying the chromosomal anomaly responsible for Down syndrome. Despite her groundbreaking work in the 1950s, Gautier’s contributions were overshadowed and appropriated for decades by a male colleague.
Our producers Lorena Galliot and Sophie McNulty traveled to Paris to visit the hospital where she worked, as well as meet her niece. We tell Marthe’s own story and set the historical record straight.
I was taught in high school that the US was running out of its resources and that Canada still had much of its resources. That was decades ago. As well, throughout the years, usually during a vote in Québec about separating, I’ve heard rumblings about the US absorbing part or all of Canada as something they call ‘Manifest Destiny,’ which dates back to the 19th century.
Unlike the previous forays Into Manifest Destiny, this one has not been precipitated by any discussion of separation.
Manifest Destiny
It took a while for that phrase to emerge this time but when it finally did the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) online news published a January 19, 2025 article by Ainsley Hawthorn providing some context for the term, Note: Links have been removed,
U.S. president-elect Donald Trump says he’s prepared to use economic force to turn Canada into America’s 51st state, and it’s making Canadians — two-thirds of whom believe he’s sincere — anxious.
But the last time Canada faced the threat of American annexation, it united us more than ever before, leading to the foundation of our country as we know it today.
In the 1860s, several prominent U.S. politicians advocated for annexing the colonies of British North America.
“I look on Rupert’s Land [modern-day Manitoba and parts of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nunavut, Ontario, and Quebec] and Canada, and see how an ingenious people and a capable, enlightened government are occupied with bridging rivers and making railroads and telegraphs,” Secretary of State William Henry Seward told a crowd in St. Paul, Minn. while campaigning on behalf of presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln.
“I am able to say, it is very well; you are building excellent states to be hereafter admitted into the American Union.”
Seward believed in Manifest Destiny, the doctrine that the United States would inevitably expand across the entire North American continent. While he seems to have preferred to acquire territory through negotiation rather than aggression, Canadians weren’t wholly assured of America’s peaceful intentions.
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In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Canadian parliament had been so deadlocked it had practically come to a standstill. Within just a few years, American pressure created a sense of unity so great it led to Confederation.
The current conversation around annexation is likewise uniting Canada’s leaders to a degree we’ve rarely seen in recent years.
Representatives across the political spectrum are sharing a common message, the same message as British North Americans in the late nineteenth century: despite our problems, Canadians value Canada.
Critical minerals and water
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had a few comments to make about US President Donald Trump’s motivation for ‘absorbing’ Canada as the 51st state, from a February 7, 2025 CBC news online article by Peter Zimonjic, ·
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told business leaders at the Canada-U.S. Economic Summit in Toronto that U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to annex Canada “is a real thing” motivated by his desire to tap into the country’s critical minerals.
“Mr. Trump has it in mind that the easiest way to do it is absorbing our country and it is a real thing,” Trudeau said, before a microphone cut out at the start of the closed-door meeting.
The prime minister made the remarks to more than 100 business leaders after delivering an opening address to the summit Friday morning [February 7, 2025], outlining the key issues facing the country when it comes to Canada’s trading relationship with the U.S.
After the opening address, media were ushered out of the room when a microphone that was left on picked up what was only meant to be heard by attendees [emphasis mine].
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Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association president Flavio Volpe was in the room when Trudeau made the comments. He said the prime minister went on to say that Trump is driven because the U.S. could benefit from Canada’s critical mineral resources.
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There was more, from a February 7, 2025 article by Nick Taylor-Vaisey for Politico., Note: A link has been removed,
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In remarks caught on tape by The Toronto Star, Trudeau suggested the president is keenly aware of Canada’s vast mineral resources. “I suggest that not only does the Trump administration know how many critical minerals we have but that may be even why they keep talking about absorbing us and making us the 51st state,” Trudeau said.
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All of this reminded me of US President Joe Biden’s visit to Canada and his interest in critical minerals which I mentioned briefly in my comments about the 2023 federal budget, from my April 17, 2023 posting (scroll down to the ‘Canadian economic theory (the staples theory), mining, nuclear energy, quantum science, and more’ subhead,
Critical minerals are getting a lot of attention these days. (They were featured in the 2022 budget, see my April 19, 2022 posting, scroll down to the Mining subhead.) This year, US President Joe Biden, in his first visit to Canada as President, singled out critical minerals at the end of his 28 hour state visit (from a March 24, 2023 CBC news online article by Alexander Panetta; Note: Links have been removed),
There was a pot of gold at the end of President Joe Biden’s jaunt to Canada. It’s going to Canada’s mining sector.
The U.S. military will deliver funds this spring to critical minerals projects in both the U.S. and Canada. The goal is to accelerate the development of a critical minerals industry on this continent.
The context is the United States’ intensifying rivalry with China.
The U.S. is desperate to reduce its reliance on its adversary for materials needed to power electric vehicles, electronics and many other products, and has set aside hundreds of millions of dollars under a program called the Defence Production Act.
The Pentagon already has told Canadian companies they would be eligible to apply. It has said the cash would arrive as grants, not loans.
On Friday [March 24, 2023], before Biden left Ottawa, he promised they’ll get some.
The White House and the Prime Minister’s Office announced that companies from both countries will be eligible this spring for money from a $250 million US fund.
Which Canadian companies? The leaders didn’t say. Canadian officials have provided the U.S. with a list of at least 70 projects that could warrant U.S. funding.
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“Our nations are blessed with incredible natural resources,” Biden told Canadian parliamentarians during his speech in the House of Commons.
“Canada in particular has large quantities of critical minerals [emphasis mine] that are essential for our clean energy future, for the world’s clean energy future.
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I don’t think there’s any question that the US knows how much, where, and how easily ‘extractable’ Canadian critical minerals might be.
Pressure builds
On the same day (Monday, February 3, 2025) the tariffs were postponed for a month,Trudeau had two telephone calls with US president Donald Trump. According to a February 9, 2025 article by Steve Chase and Stefanie Marotta for the Globe and Mail, Trump and his minions are exploring the possibility of acquiring Canada by means other than a trade war or economic domination,
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“He [Trudeau] talked about two phone conversations he had with Mr. Trump on Monday [February 3, 2025] before the President agreed to delay to steep tariffs on Canadian goods for 30 days.n
During the calls, the Prime Minister recalled Mr. Trump referred to a four-page memo that included a list of grievances he had with Canadian trade and commercial rules, including the President’s false claim that US banks are unable to operate in Canada. …
In the second conversation with Mr. Trump on Monday, the Prime Minister told the summit, the President asked him whether he was familiar with the Treaty of 1908, a pact between the United States and Britain that defined the border between the United States and Canada. he told Mr. Trudeau, he should look it up.
Mr. Trudeau told the summit he thought the treaty had been superseded by other developments such as the repatriation the Canadian Constitution – in other words, that the border cannot be dissolved by repealing that treaty. He told the audience that international law would prevent the dissolution 1908 Treaty leading to the erasure of the border. For example, various international laws define sovereign borders, including the United Nationals Charter of which both countries are signatories and which has protection to territorial integrity.
A source familiar with the calls said Mr. Trump’s reference to the 1908 Treaty was taken as an implied threat. … [p. A3 in paper version]
I imagine Mr. Trump and/or his minions will keep trying to find one pretext or another for this attempt to absorb or annex or wage war (economically or otherwise) on Canada.
What makes Canadian (and Greenlandic) minerals and water so important?
You may have noticed the January 21, 2025 announcement by Mr. Trump about the ‘Stargate Project,’ a proposed US $500B AI infrastructure company (you can find more about the Stargate Project (Stargate LLC) in its Wikipedia entry).
Most likely not a coincidence, on February 10, 2025 President of France, Emmanuel Macron announced a 109B euros investment in French AI sector, from the February 9, 2025 Reuters preannouncement article,
France will announce private sector investments totalling some 109 billion euros ($112.5 billion [US]) in its artificial intelligence sector during the Paris AI summit which opens on Monday, President Emmanuel Macron said.
The financing includes plans by Canadian investment firm [emphasis mine] Brookfield to invest 20 billion euros in AI projects in France and financing from the United Arab Emirates which could hit 50 billion euros in the years ahead, Macron’s office said.
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Big projects, non? It’s no surprise critical minerals will be necessary but the need for massive amounts of water may be. My October 16, 2023 posting focuses on water and AI development, specifically ChatGPT-4,
A September 9, 2023 news item (an Associated Press article by Matt O’Brien and Hannah Fingerhut) on phys.org and also published September 12, 2023 on the Iowa Public Radio website, describe an unexpected cost for building ChatGPT and other AI agents, Note: Links [in the excerpt] have been removed,
The cost of building an artificial intelligence product like ChatGPT can be hard to measure.
But one thing Microsoft-backed OpenAI needed for its technology was plenty of water [emphases mine], pulled from the watershed of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers in central Iowa to cool a powerful supercomputer as it helped teach its AI systems how to mimic human writing.
As they race to capitalize on a craze for generative AI, leading tech developers including Microsoft, OpenAI and Google have acknowledged that growing demand for their AI tools carries hefty costs, from expensive semiconductors to an increase in water consumption.
But they’re often secretive about the specifics. Few people in Iowa knew about its status as a birthplace of OpenAI’s most advanced large language model, GPT-4, before a top Microsoft executive said in a speech it “was literally made next to cornfields west of Des Moines.”
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In its latest environmental report, Microsoft disclosed that its global water consumption spiked 34% from 2021 to 2022 (to nearly 1.7 billion gallons , or more than 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools), a sharp increase compared to previous years that outside researchers tie to its AI research. [emphases mine]
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As for how much water was diverted in Iowa for a data centre project, from my October 16, 2023 posting
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Jason Clayworth’s September 18, 2023 article for AXIOS describes the issue from the Iowan perspective, Note: Links [from the excerpt] have been removed,
Future data center projects in West Des Moines will only be considered if Microsoft can implement technology that can “significantly reduce peak water usage,” the Associated Press reports.
Why it matters: Microsoft’s five WDM data centers — the “epicenter for advancing AI” — represent more than $5 billion in investments in the last 15 years.
Yes, but: They consumed as much as 11.5 million gallons of water a month for cooling, or about 6% of WDM’s total usage during peak summer usage during the last two years, according to information from West Des Moines Water Works.
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The bottom line is that these technologies consume a lot of water and require critical minerals.
Greenland
Evan Dyer’s January 16, 2025 article for CBC news online describes both US military strategic interests and hunger for resources, Note 1: Article links have been removed; Note 2: I have added one link to a Wikipedia entry,
The person who first put a bug in Donald Trump’s ear about Greenland — if a 2022 biography is to be believed — was his friend Ronald Lauder, a New York billionaire and heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune.
But it would be wrong to believe that U.S. interest in Greenland originated with idle chatter at the country club, rather than real strategic considerations.
Trump’s talk of using force to annex Greenland — which would be an unprovoked act of war against a NATO ally — has been rebuked by Greenlandic, Danish and European leaders. A Fox News team that travelled to Greenland’s capital Nuuk reported back to the Trump-friendly show Fox & Friends that “most of the people we spoke with did not support Trump’s comments and found them offensive.”
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Certainly, military considerations motivated the last U.S. attempt at buying Greenland in 1946.
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The military value to the U.S. of acquiring Greenland is much less clear in 2025 than it was in 1946.
Russian nuclear submarines no longer need to traverse the GIUK [the GIUK gap; “{sometimes written G-I-UK} is an area in the northern Atlantic Ocean that forms a naval choke point. Its name is an acronym for Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom, the gap being the two stretches of open ocean among these three landmasses.”]. They can launch their missiles from closer to home.
And in any case, the U.S. already has a military presence on Greenland, used for early warning, satellite tracking and marine surveillance. The Pentagon simply ignored Denmark’s 1957 ban on nuclear weapons on Greenlandic territory. Indeed, an American B-52 bomber carrying four hydrogen bombs crashed in Greenland in 1968.
“The U.S. already has almost unhindered access [emphasis mine], and just building on their relationship with Greenland is going to do far more good than talk of acquisition,” said Dwayne Menezes, director of the Polar Research and Policy Initiative in London.
The complication, he says, is Greenland’s own independence movement. All existing defence agreements involving the U.S. presence in Greenland are between Washington and the Kingdom of Denmark. [emphasis mine]
“They can’t control what’s happening between Denmark and Greenland,” Menezes said. “Over the long term, the only way to mitigate that risk altogether is by acquiring Greenland.”
Menezes also doesn’t believe U.S. interest in Greenland is purely military.
And Trump’s incoming national security adviser Michael Waltz [emphasis mine] appeared to confirm as much when asked by Fox News why the administration wanted Greenland.
“This is about critical minerals, this is about natural resources [emphasis mine]. This is about, as the ice caps pull back, the Chinese are now cranking out icebreakers and are pushing up there.”
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While the United States has an abundance of natural resources, it risks coming up short in two vital areas: rare-earth minerals and freshwater.
Greenland’s apparent barrenness belies its richness in those two key 21st-century resources.
The U.S. rise to superpower was driven partly by the good fortune of having abundant reserves of oil, which fuelled its industrial growth. The country is still a net exporter of petroleum.
China, Washington’s chief strategic rival, had no such luck. It has to import more than two-thirds of its oil, and is now importing more than six times as much as it did in 2000.
But the future may not favour the U.S. as much as the past.
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I stand corrected, where oil is concerned. From Dyer’s January 16, 2025 article, Note: Links have been removed,
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It’s China, and not the U.S., that nature blessed with rich deposits of rare-earth elements, a collection of 17 metals such as yttrium and scandium that are increasingly necessary for high-tech applications from cellphones and flat-screen TVs to electric cars.
The rare-earth element neodymium is an essential part of many computer hard drives and defence systems including electronic displays, guidance systems, lasers, radar and sonar.
Three decades ago, the U.S. produced a third of the world’s rare-earth elements, and China about 40 per cent. By 2011, China had 97 per cent of world production, and its government was increasingly limiting and controlling exports.
The U.S. has responded by opening new mines and spurring recovery and recycling to reduce dependence on China.
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Such efforts have allowed the U.S. to claw back about 20 per cent of the world’s annual production of rare-earth elements. But that doesn’t change the fact that China has about 44 million tonnes of reserves, compared to fewer than two million in the U.S.
“There’s a huge dependency on China,” said Menezes. “It offers China the economic leverage, in the midst of a trade war in particular, to restrict supply to the West, thus crippling industries like defence, the green transition. This is where Greenland comes in.”
Greenland’s known reserves are almost equivalent to those of the entire U.S., and much more may lie beneath its icebound landscape.
“Greenland is believed to be able to meet at least 25 per cent of global rare-earth demand well into the future,” he said.
An abundance of freshwater
The melting ice caps referenced by Trump’s nominee for national security adviser are another Greenlandic resource the world is increasingly interested in.
Seventy per cent of the world’s freshwater is locked up in the Antarctic ice cap. Of the remainder, two-thirds is in Greenland, in a massive ice cap that is turning to liquid at nearly twice the volume of melting in Antarctica.
“We know this because you can weigh the ice sheet from satellites,” said Christian Schoof, a professor of Earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences at the University of British Columbia who spent part of last year in Greenland studying ice cap melting.
“The ice sheet is heavy enough that it affects the orbit of satellites going over it. And you can record the change in that acceleration of satellites due to the ice sheet over time, and directly weigh the ice sheet.”
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“There is a growing demand for freshwater on the world market, and the use of the vast water potential in Greenland may contribute to meeting this demand,” the Greenland government announces on its website.
The Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland found 10 locations that were suitable for the commercial exploitation of Greenland’s ice and water, and has already issued a number of licenses.
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Schoof told CBC News that past projects that attempted to tow Greenlandic ice to irrigate farms in the Middle East “haven’t really taken off … but humans are resourceful and inventive, and we face some really significant issues in the future.”
For the U.S., those issues include the 22-year-long “megadrought” which has left the western U.S. [emphases mine] drier than at any time in the past 1,200 years, and which is already threatening the future of some American cities.
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As important as they are, there’s more than critical minerals and water, according to Dyer’s January 16, 2025 article
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Even the “rock flour” that lies under the ice cap could have great commercial and strategic importance.
Ground into nanoparticles by the crushing weight of the ice, research has revealed it to have almost miraculous properties, says Menezes.
“Scientists have found that Greenlandic glacial flour has a particular nutrient composition that enables it to be regenerative of soil conditions elsewhere,” he told CBC News. “It improves agricultural yields. It has direct implications for food security.”
Spreading Greenland rock flour on corn fields in Ghana produced a 30 to 50 per cent increase in crop yields. Similar yield gains occurred when it was spread on Danish fields that produce the barley for Carlsberg beer.
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Canada
It’s getting a little tiring keeping up with Mr. Trump’s tariff tear (using ‘tear’ as a verbal noun; from the Cambridge dictionary, verb: TEAR definition: 1. to pull or be pulled apart, or to pull pieces off: 2. to move very quickly …).
The bottom line is that Mr. Trump wants something and certainly Canadian critical minerals and water constitute either his entire interest or, at least, his main interest for now, with more to be determined later.
Niall McGee’s February 9, 2025 article for the Globe and Mail provides an overview of the US’s dependence on Canada’s critical minerals,
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The US relies on Canada for a huge swath of its critical mineral imports, including 40 per cent of its primary nickel for its defence industry, 30 per cent of its uranium, which is used in its nuclear-power fleet, and 79 per cent of its potash for growing crops.
The US produces only small amounts of all three, while Canada is the world’s biggest potash producer, the second biggest in uranium, and number six in nickel.
If the US wants to buy fewer critical minerals from Canada, in many cases it would be forced to source them from hostile countries such as Russia and China.
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Vancouver-based Teck Resources Ltd. is one of the few North American suppliers of germanium. The critical mineral is used in fibre-optic networks, infrared vision systems, solar panels. The US relies on Canada for 23 per cent of its imports of germanium.
China in December [2024] banned exports of the critical mineral to the US citing national security concerns. The ban raised fears of possible shortages for the US.
“It’s obvious we have a lot of what Trump wants to support America’s ambitions, from both an economic and a geopolitical standpoint,” says Martin Turenne, CEO of Vancouver-based FPX Nickel Corp., which is developing a massive nickel project in British Columbia. [p. B5 paper version]
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Akshay Kulkarni’s January 15, 2025 article for CBC news online provides more details about British Columbia and its critical minerals, Note: Links have been removed,
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The premier had suggested Tuesday [January 14, 2025] that retaliatory tariffs and export bans could be part of the response, and cited a smelter operation located in Trail, B.C. [emphasis mine; keep reading], which exports minerals that Eby [Premier of British Columbia, David Eby] said are critical for the U.S.
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The U.S. and Canada both maintain lists of critical minerals — ranging from aluminum and tin to more obscure elements like ytterbium and hafnium — that both countries say are important for defence, energy production and other key areas.
Michael Goehring, the president of the Mining Association of B.C., said B.C. has access to or produces 16 of the 50 minerals considered critical by the U.S.
Individual atoms of silicon and germanium are seen following an Atomic Probe Tomography (APT) measurement at Polytechnique Montreal. Both minerals are manufactured in B.C. (Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press)
“We have 17 critical mineral projects on the horizon right now, along with a number of precious metal projects,” he told CBC News on Tuesday [January 14, 2025].
“The 17 critical mineral projects alone represent some $32 billion in potential investment for British Columbia,” he added.
John Steen, director of the Bradshaw Research Institute for Minerals and Mining at the University of B.C., pointed to germanium — which is manufactured at Teck’s facility in Trail [emphasis mine] — as one of the materials most important to U.S industry.
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There are a number of mines and manufacturing facilities across B.C. and Canada for critical minerals.
The B.C. government says the province is Canada’s largest producer of copper, and only producer of molybdenum, which are both considered critical minerals.
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There’s also graphite, not in BC but in Québec. This April 8, 2023 article by Christian Paas-Lang for CBC news online focuses largely on issues of how to access and exploit graphite and also, importantly, indigenous concerns, but this excerpt focuses on graphite as a critical mineral,
A mining project might not be what comes to mind when you think of the transition to a lower emissions economy. But embedded in electric vehicles, solar panels and hydrogen fuel storage are metals and minerals that come from mines like the one in Lac-des-Îles, Que.
The graphite mine, owned by the company Northern Graphite, is just one of many projects aimed at extracting what are now officially dubbed “critical minerals” — substances of significant strategic and economic importance to the future of national economies.
Lac-des-Îles is the only significant graphite mining project in North America, accounting for Canada’s contribution to an industry dominated by China.
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There was another proposed graphite mine in Québec, which encountered significant push back from the local Indigenous community as noted in my November 26, 2024 posting, “Local resistance to Lomiko Metals’ Outaouais graphite mine.” The posting also provides a very brief update of graphite mining in Canada.
It seems to me that water does not get the attention that it should and that’s why I lead with water in my headline. Eric Reguly’s February 9, 2025 article in the Globe and Mail highlights some of the water issues facing the US, not just Iowa,
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Water may be the real reason, or one of the top reasons, propelling his [Mr. Trump’s] desire to turn Canada into Minnesota North. Canadians represent 0.5 per cent of the globe’s population yet sit on 20% or more of its fresh water. Vast tracts of the United States routinely suffer from water shortages, which are drying up rivers – the once mighty Colorado River no longer reaches the Pacific Ocean – shrinking aquifers beneath farmland and preventing water-intensive industries from building factories. Warming average temperatures will intensify the shortages. [p. B2 in paper version]
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Reguly is more interested in the impact water shortages have on industry. He also offers a brief history of US interest in acquiring Canadian water resources dating back to the first North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that came into effect on January 1, 1994.
A March 6, 2024 article by Elia Nilsen for CNN television news online details Colorado river geography and gives you a sense of just how serious the situation is, Note: Links have been removed,
Seven Western states are starting to plot a future for how much water they’ll draw from the dwindling Colorado River in a warmer, drier world.
The river is the lifeblood for the West – providing drinking water for tens of millions, irrigating crops, and powering homes and industry with hydroelectric dams.
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This has bought states more time to figure out how to divvy up the river after 2026, when the current operating guidelines expire.
To that end, the four upper basin river states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming submitted their proposal for how future cuts should be divvied up among the seven states to the federal government on Tuesday [March 5, 2024], and the three lower basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada submitted their plan on Wednesday [March 6, 2024].
One thing is clear from the competing plans: The two groups of states do not agree so far on who should bear the brunt of future cuts if water levels drop in the Colorado River basin.
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As of a December 12, 2024 article by Shannon Mullane for watereducationcolorado.org, the states are still wrangling and they are not the only interested parties, Note: A link has been removed,
… officials from seven states are debating the terms of a new agreement for how to store, release and deliver Colorado River water for years to come, and they have until 2026 to finalize a plan. This month, the tone of the state negotiations soured as some state negotiators threw barbs and others called for an end to the political rhetoric and saber-rattling.
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The state negotiators are not the only players at the table: Tribal leaders, federal officials, environmental organizations, agricultural groups, cities, industrial interests and others are weighing in on the process.
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Water use from the Colorado river has international implications as this February 5, 2025 essay (Water is the other US-Mexico border crisis, and the supply crunch is getting worse) by Gabriel Eckstein, professor of law at Texas A&M University and Rosario Sanchez, senior research scientist at Texas Water Resources Institute and at Texas A&M University for The Conversation makes clear, Note: Links have been removed,
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The Colorado River provides water to more than 44 million people, including seven U.S. and two Mexican states, 29 Indian tribes and 5.5 million acres of farmland. Only about 10% of its total flow reaches Mexico. The river once emptied into the Gulf of California, but now so much water is withdrawn along its course that since the 1960s it typically peters out in the desert.
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At least 28 aquifers – underground rock formations that contain water – also traverse the border. With a few exceptions, very little information on these shared resources exists. One thing that is known is that many of them are severely overtapped and contaminated.
Nonetheless, reliance on aquifers is growing as surface water supplies dwindle. Some 80% of groundwater used in the border region goes to agriculture. The rest is used by farmers and industries, such as automotive and appliance manufacturers.
Over 10 million people in 30 cities and communities throughout the border region rely on groundwater for domestic use. Many communities, including Ciudad Juarez; the sister cities of Nogales in both Arizona and Sonora; and the sister cities of Columbus in New Mexico and Puerto Palomas in Chihuahua, get all or most of their fresh water from these aquifers.
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A booming region
About 30 million people live within 100 miles (160 kilometers) of the border on both sides. Over the next 30 years, that figure is expected to double.
Municipal and industrial water use throughout the region is also expected to increase. In Texas’ lower Rio Grande Valley, municipal use alone could more than double by 2040.
At the same time, as climate change continues to worsen, scientists project that snowmelt will decrease and evaporation rates will increase. The Colorado River’s baseflow – the portion of its volume that comes from groundwater, rather than from rain and snow – may decline by nearly 30% in the next 30 years.
Precipitation patterns across the region are projected to be uncertain and erratic for the foreseeable future. This trend will fuel more extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods, which could cause widespread harm to crops, industrial activity, human health and the environment.
Further stress comes from growth and development. Both the Colorado River and Rio Grande are tainted by pollutants from agricultural, municipal and industrial sources. Cities on both sides of the border, especially on the Mexican side, have a long history of dumping untreated sewage into the Rio Grande. Of the 55 water treatment plants located along the border, 80% reported ongoing maintenance, capacity and operating problems as of 2019.
Drought across the border region is already stoking domestic and bilateral tensions. Competing water users are struggling to meet their needs, and the U.S. and Mexico are straining to comply with treaty obligations for sharing water [emphasis mine].
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Getting back to Canada and water, Reguly’s February 9, 2025 article notes Mr. Trump’s attitude towards our water,
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Mr. Trump’s transaction-oriented brain know that water availability translates into job availability. If Canada were forced to export water by bulk to the United States, Canada would in effect be exporting jobs and America absorbing them. In the fall [2024] when he was campaigning, he called British Columbia “essentially a very large faucet” [emphasis mine] that could be used to overcome California’s permanent water deficit.
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In Canada’s favour, Canadians have been united in their opposition to bulk water exports. That sentiment is codified in the Transboundary Waters Protection Act, which bans large scale removal from waterways shared with the United States. … [p. B2 in paper version]
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It’s reassuring to read that we have some rules regarding water removal but British Columbia also has a water treaty with the US, the Columbia River Treaty, and an update to it lingers in limbo as Kirk Lapointe notes in his February 6, 2025 article for vancouverisawesome.com. Lapointe mentions shortcomings on both sides of the negotiating table for the delay in ratifying the update while expressing concern over Mr. Trump’s possible machinations should this matter cross his radar.
What about Ukraine’s critical mineral?
A February 13, 2025 article by Geoff Nixon for CBC news online provides some of the latest news on the situation between the US and the Ukraine, Note: Links have been removed,
Ukraine has clearly grabbed the attention of U.S. President Donald Trump with its apparent willingness to share access to rare-earth resources with Washington, in exchange for its continued support and security guarantees.
Trump wants what he calls “equalization” for support the U.S. has provided to Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion. And he wants this payment in the form of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, metals “and other things,” as the U.S. leader put it last week.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has travelled to Ukraine to discuss the proposition, which was first raised with Trump last fall [2024], telling reporters Wednesday [February 12, 2025] that he hoped a deal could be reached within days.
Bessent says such a deal could provide a “security shield” in post-war Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, meanwhile, said in his daily address that it would both strengthen Ukraine’s security and “give new momentum to our economic relations.”
But just how much trust can Kyiv put in a Trump-led White House to provide support to Ukraine, now and in the future? Ukraine may not be in a position to back away from the offer, with Trump’s interest piqued and U.S. support remaining critical for Kyiv after nearly three years of all-out war with Russia.
“I think the problem for Ukraine is that it doesn’t really have much choice,” said Oxana Shevel, an associate professor of political science at Boston’s Tufts University.
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Then there’s the issue of the Ukrainian minerals, which have to remain in Kyiv’s hands in order for the U.S. to access them — a point Zelenskyy and other Ukraine officials have underlined.
There are more than a dozen elements considered to be rare earths, and Ukraine’s Institute of Geology says those that can be found in Ukraine include lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, erbium and yttrium. EU-funded research also indicates that Ukraine has scandium reserves. But the details of the data are classified.
Rare earths are used in manufacturing magnets that turn power into motion for electric vehicles, in cellphones and other electronics, as well as for scientific and industrial applications.
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Trump has said he wants the equivalent of $500 billion US in rare earth minerals.
Yuriy Gorodnichenko, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, says any effort to develop and extract these resources won’t happen overnight and it’s unclear how plentiful they are.
“The fact is, nobody knows how much you have for sure there and what is the value of that,” he said in an interview.
“It will take years to do geological studies,” he said. “Years to build extraction facilities.”
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Just how desperate is the US?
Yes, the United States has oil but it doesn’t have much in the way of materials it needs for the new technologies and it’s running out of something very basic: water.
I don’t know how desperate the US is but Mr. Trump’s flailings suggest that the answer is very, very desperate.
There’s been quite the kerfuffle over DeepSeek during the last few days. This January 27, 2025 article by Alexandra Mae Jones for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) news only was my introduction to DeepSeek AI, Note: A link has been removed,
There’s a new player in AI on the world stage: DeepSeek, a Chinese startup that’s throwing tech valuations into chaos and challenging U.S. dominance in the field with an open-source model that they say they developed for a fraction of the cost of competitors.
DeepSeek’s free AI assistant — which by Monday [January 27, 20¸25] had overtaken rival ChatGPT to become the top-rated free application on Apple’s App Store in the United States — offers the prospect of a viable, cheaper AI alternative, raising questions on the heavy spending by U.S. companies such as Apple and Microsoft, amid a growing investor push for returns.
U.S. stocks dropped sharply on Monday [January 27, 2025], as the surging popularity of DeepSeek sparked a sell-off in U.S. chipmakers.
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“[DeepSeek] performs as well as the leading models in Silicon Valley and in some cases, according to their claims, even better,” Sheldon Fernandez, co-founder of DarwinAI, told CBC News. “But they did it with a fractional amount of the resources is really what is turning heads in our industry.”
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What is DeepSeek?
Little is known about the small Hangzhou startup behind DeepSeek, which was founded out of a hedge fund in 2023, but largely develops open-source AI models.
Its researchers wrote in a paper last month that the DeepSeek-V3 model, launched on Jan. 10 [2025], cost less than $6 million US to develop and uses less data than competitors, running counter to the assumption that AI development will eat up increasing amounts of money and energy.
Some analysts are skeptical about DeepSeek’s $6 million claim, pointing out that this figure only covers computing power. But Fernandez said that even if you triple DeepSeek’s cost estimates, it would still cost significantly less than its competitors.
The open source release of DeepSeek-R1, which came out on Jan. 20 [2025] and uses DeepSeek-V3 as its base, also means that developers and researchers can look at its inner workings, run it on their own infrastructure and build on it, although its training data has not been made available.
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“Instead of paying Open $20 a month or $200 a month for the latest advanced versions of these models, [people] can really get these types of features for free. And so it really upends a lot of the business model that a lot of these companies were relying on to justify their very high valuations.”
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A key difference between DeepSeek’s AI assistant, R1, and other chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT is that DeepSeek lays out its reasoning when it answers prompts and questions, something developers are excited about.
“The dealbreaker is the access to the raw thinking steps,” Elvis Saravia, an AI researcher and co-founder of the U.K.-based AI consulting firm DAIR.AI, wrote on X, adding that the response quality was “comparable” to OpenAI’s latest reasoning model, o1.
U.S. dominance in AI challenged
One of the reasons DeepSeek is making headlines is because its development occurred despite U.S. actions to keep Americans at the top of AI development. In 2022, the U.S. curbed exports of computer chips to China, hampering their advanced supercomputing development.
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The latest AI models from DeepSeek are widely seen to be competitive with those of OpenAI and Meta, which rely on high-end computer chips and extensive computing power.
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Christine Mui in a January 27, 2025 article for Politico notes the stock ‘crash’ taking place while focusing on the US policy implications, Note: Links set by Politico have been removed while I have added one link
A little-known Chinese artificial intelligence startup shook the tech world this weekend by releasing an OpenAI-like assistant, which shot to the No.1 ranking on Apple’s app store and caused American tech giants’ stocks to tumble.
From Washington’s perspective, the news raised an immediate policy alarm: It happened despite consistent, bipartisan efforts to stifle AI progress in China.
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In tech terms, what freaked everyone out about DeepSeek’s R1 model is that it replicated — and in some cases, surpassed — the performance of OpenAI’s cutting-edge o1 product across a host of performance benchmarks, at a tiny fraction of the cost.
The business takeaway was straightforward. DeepSeek’s success shows that American companies might not need to spend nearly as much as expected to develop AI models. That both intrigues and worries investors and tech leaders.
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The policy implications, though, are more complex. Washington’s rampant anxiety about beating China has led to policies that the industry has very mixed feelings about.
On one hand, most tech firms hate the export controls that stop them from selling as much to the world’s second-largest economy, and force them to develop new products if they want to do business with China. If DeepSeek shows those rules are pointless, many would be delighted to see them go away.
On the other hand, anti-China, protectionist sentiment has encouraged Washington to embrace a whole host of industry wishlist items, from a lighter-touch approach to AI rules to streamlined permitting for related construction projects. Does DeepSeek mean those, too, are failing? Or does it trigger a doubling-down?
DeepSeek’s success truly seems to challenge the belief that the future of American AI demands ever more chips and power. That complicates Trump’s interest in rapidly building out that kind of infrastructure in the U.S.
Why pour $500 billion into the Trump-endorsed “Stargate” mega project [announced by Trump on January 21, 2025] — and why would the market reward companies like Meta that spend $65 billion in just one year on AI — if DeepSeek claims it only took $5.6 million and second-tier Nvidia chips to train one of its latest models? (U.S. industry insiders dispute the startup’s figures and claim they don’t tell the full story, but even at 100 times that cost, it would be a bargain.)
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Tech companies, of course, love the recent bloom of federal support, and it’s unlikely they’ll drop their push for more federal investment to match anytime soon. Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist and Trump ally, argued today that DeepSeek should be seen as “AI’s Sputnik moment,” one that raises the stakes for the global competition.
That would strengthen the case that some American AI companies have been pressing for the new administration to invest government resources into AI infrastructure (OpenAI), tighten restrictions on China (Anthropic) and ease up on regulations to ensure their developers build “artificial general intelligence” before their geopolitical rivals.
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The British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) Peter Hoskins & Imran Rahman-Jones provided a European perspective and some additional information in their January 27, 2025 article for BBC news online, Note: Links have been removed,
US tech giant Nvidia lost over a sixth of its value after the surging popularity of a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) app spooked investors in the US and Europe.
DeepSeek, a Chinese AI chatbot reportedly made at a fraction of the cost of its rivals, launched last week but has already become the most downloaded free app in the US.
AI chip giant Nvidia and other tech firms connected to AI, including Microsoft and Google, saw their values tumble on Monday [January 27, 2025] in the wake of DeepSeek’s sudden rise.
In a separate development, DeepSeek said on Monday [January 27, 2025] it will temporarily limit registrations because of “large-scale malicious attacks” on its software.
The DeepSeek chatbot was reportedly developed for a fraction of the cost of its rivals, raising questions about the future of America’s AI dominance and the scale of investments US firms are planning.
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DeepSeek is powered by the open source DeepSeek-V3 model, which its researchers claim was trained for around $6m – significantly less than the billions spent by rivals.
But this claim has been disputed by others in AI.
The researchers say they use already existing technology, as well as open source code – software that can be used, modified or distributed by anybody free of charge.
DeepSeek’s emergence comes as the US is restricting the sale of the advanced chip technology that powers AI to China.
To continue their work without steady supplies of imported advanced chips, Chinese AI developers have shared their work with each other and experimented with new approaches to the technology.
This has resulted in AI models that require far less computing power than before.
It also means that they cost a lot less than previously thought possible, which has the potential to upend the industry.
After DeepSeek-R1 was launched earlier this month, the company boasted of “performance on par with” one of OpenAI’s latest models when used for tasks such as maths, coding and natural language reasoning.
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In Europe, Dutch chip equipment maker ASML ended Monday’s trading with its share price down by more than 7% while shares in Siemens Energy, which makes hardware related to AI, had plunged by a fifth.
“This idea of a low-cost Chinese version hasn’t necessarily been forefront, so it’s taken the market a little bit by surprise,” said Fiona Cincotta, senior market analyst at City Index.
“So, if you suddenly get this low-cost AI model, then that’s going to raise concerns over the profits of rivals, particularly given the amount that they’ve already invested in more expensive AI infrastructure.”
Singapore-based technology equity adviser Vey-Sern Ling told the BBC it could “potentially derail the investment case for the entire AI supply chain”.
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Who founded DeepSeek?
The company was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng in Hangzhou, a city in southeastern China.
The 40-year-old, an information and electronic engineering graduate, also founded the hedge fund that backed DeepSeek.
He reportedly built up a store of Nvidia A100 chips, now banned from export to China.
Experts believe this collection – which some estimates put at 50,000 – led him to launch DeepSeek, by pairing these chips with cheaper, lower-end ones that are still available to import.
Mr Liang was recently seen at a meeting between industry experts and the Chinese premier Li Qiang.
In a July 2024 interview with The China Academy, Mr Liang said he was surprised by the reaction to the previous version of his AI model.
“We didn’t expect pricing to be such a sensitive issue,” he said.
“We were simply following our own pace, calculating costs, and setting prices accordingly.”
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A January 28, 2025 article by Daria Solovieva for salon.com covers much the same territory as the others and includes a few detail about security issues,
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The pace at which U.S. consumers have embraced DeepSeek is raising national security concerns similar to those surrounding TikTok, the social media platform that faces a ban unless it is sold to a non-Chinese company.
The U.S. Supreme Court this month upheld a federal law that requires TikTok’s sale. The Court sided with the U.S. government’s argument that the app can collect and track data on its 170 million American users. President Donald Trump has paused enforcement of the ban until April to try to negotiate a deal.
But “the threat posed by DeepSeek is more direct and acute than TikTok,” Luke de Pulford, co-founder and executive director of non-profit Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, told Salon.
DeepSeek is a fully Chinese company and is subject to Communist Party control, unlike TikTok which positions itself as independent from parent company ByteDance, he said.
“DeepSeek logs your keystrokes, device data, location and so much other information and stores it all in China,” de Pulford said. “So you’ll never know if the Chinese state has been crunching your data to gain strategic advantage, and DeepSeek would be breaking the law if they told you.”
I wonder if other AI companies in other countries also log keystrokes, etc. Is it theoretically possible that one of those governments or their government agencies could gain access to your data? It’s obvious in China but people in other countries may have the issues.
Censorship: DeepSeek and ChatGPT
Anis Heydari’s January 28, 2025 article for CBC news online reveals some surprising results from a head to head comparison between DeepSeek and ChatGPT,
The Chinese-made AI chatbot DeepSeek may not always answer some questions about topics that are often censored by Beijing, according to tests run by CBC News and The Associated Press, and is providing different information than its U.S.-owned competitor ChatGPT.
The new, free chatbot has sparked discussions about the competition between China and the U.S. in AI development, with many users flocking to test it.
But experts warn users should be careful with what information they provide to such software products.
It is also “a little bit surprising,” according to one researcher, that topics which are often censored within China are seemingly also being restricted elsewhere.
“A lot of services will differentiate based on where the user is coming from when deciding to deploy censorship or not,” said Jeffrey Knockel, who researches software censorship and surveillance at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.
“With this one, it just seems to be censoring everyone.”
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Both CBC News and The Associated Press posed questions to DeepSeek and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with mixed and differing results.
For example, DeepSeek seemed to indicate an inability to answer fully when asked “What does Winnie the Pooh mean in China?” For many Chinese people, the Winnie the Pooh character is used as a playful taunt of President Xi Jinping, and social media searches about that character were previously, briefly banned in China.
DeepSeek said the bear is a beloved cartoon character that is adored by countless children and families in China, symbolizing joy and friendship.
Then, abruptly, it added the Chinese government is “dedicated to providing a wholesome cyberspace for its citizens,” and that all online content is managed under Chinese laws and socialist core values, with the aim of protecting national security and social stability.
CBC News was unable to produce this response. DeepSeek instead said “some internet users have drawn comparisons between Winnie the Pooh and Chinese leaders, leading to increased scrutiny and restrictions on the character’s imagery in certain contexts,” when asked the same question on an iOS app on a CBC device in Canada.
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Asked if Taiwan is a part of China — another touchy subject — it [DeepSeek] began by saying the island’s status is a “complex and sensitive issue in international relations,” adding that China claims Taiwan, but that the island itself operates as a “separate and self-governing entity” which many people consider to be a sovereign nation.
But as that answer was being typed out, for both CBC and the AP, it vanished and was replaced with: “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”
…
… Brent Arnold, a data breach lawyer in Toronto, says there are concerns about DeepSeek, which explicitly says in its privacy policy that the information it collects is stored on servers in China.
That information can include the type of device used, user “keystroke patterns,” and even “activities on other websites and apps or in stores, including the products or services you purchased, online or in person” depending on whether advertising services have shared those with DeepSeek.
“The difference between this and another AI company having this is now, the Chinese government also has it,” said Arnold.
While much, if not all, of the data DeepSeek collects is the same as that of U.S.-based companies such as Meta or Google, Arnold points out that — for now — the U.S. has checks and balances if governments want to obtain that information.
“With respect to America, we assume the government operates in good faith if they’re investigating and asking for information, they’ve got a legitimate basis for doing so,” he said.
Right now, Arnold says it’s not accurate to compare Chinese and U.S. authorities in terms of their ability to take personal information. But that could change.
“I would say it’s a false equivalency now. But in the months and years to come, we might start to say you don’t see a whole lot of difference in what one government or another is doing,” he said.
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Graham Fraser’s January 28, 2025 article comparing DeepSeek to the others (OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini) for BBC news online took a different approach,
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Writing Assistance
When you ask ChatGPT what the most popular reasons to use ChatGPT are, it says that assisting people to write is one of them.
From gathering and summarising information in a helpful format to even writing blog posts on a topic, ChatGPT has become an AI companion for many across different workplaces.
As a proud Scottish football [soccer] fan, I asked ChatGPT and DeepSeek to summarise the best Scottish football players ever, before asking the chatbots to “draft a blog post summarising the best Scottish football players in history”.
DeepSeek responded in seconds, with a top ten list – Kenny Dalglish of Liverpool and Celtic was number one. It helpfully summarised which position the players played in, their clubs, and a brief list of their achievements.
DeepSeek also detailed two non-Scottish players – Rangers legend Brian Laudrup, who is Danish, and Celtic hero Henrik Larsson. For the latter, it added “although Swedish, Larsson is often included in discussions of Scottish football legends due to his impact at Celtic”.
For its subsequent blog post, it did go into detail of Laudrup’s nationality before giving a succinct account of the careers of the players.
ChatGPT’s answer to the same question contained many of the same names, with “King Kenny” once again at the top of the list.
Its detailed blog post briefly and accurately went into the careers of all the players.
It concluded: “While the game has changed over the decades, the impact of these Scottish greats remains timeless.” Indeed.
For this fun test, DeepSeek was certainly comparable to its best-known US competitor.
Coding
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Brainstorming ideas
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Learning and research
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Steaming ahead
The tasks I set the chatbots were simple but they point to something much more significant – the winner of the so-called AI race is far from decided.
For all the vast resources US firms have poured into the tech, their Chinese rival has shown their achievements can be emulated.
…
Reception from the science community
Days before the news outlets discovered DeepSeek, the company published a paper about its Large Language Models (LLMs) and its new chatbot on arXiv. Here’s a little more information,
DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
[over 100 authors are listed]
We introduce our first-generation reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1. DeepSeek-R1-Zero, a model trained via large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a preliminary step, demonstrates remarkable reasoning capabilities. Through RL, DeepSeek-R1-Zero naturally emerges with numerous powerful and intriguing reasoning behaviors. However, it encounters challenges such as poor readability, and language mixing. To address these issues and further enhance reasoning performance, we introduce DeepSeek-R1, which incorporates multi-stage training and cold-start data before RL. DeepSeek-R1 achieves performance comparable to OpenAI-o1-1217 on reasoning tasks. To support the research community, we open-source DeepSeek-R1-Zero, DeepSeek-R1, and six dense models (1.5B, 7B, 8B, 14B, 32B, 70B) distilled from DeepSeek-R1 based on Qwen and Llama.
A Chinese-built large language model called DeepSeek-R1 is thrilling scientists as an affordable and open rival to ‘reasoning’ models such as OpenAI’s o1.
These models generate responses step-by-step, in a process analogous to human reasoning. This makes them more adept than earlier language models at solving scientific problems and could make them useful in research. Initial tests of R1, released on 20 January, show that its performance on certain tasks in chemistry, mathematics and coding is on par with that of o1 — which wowed researchers when it was released by OpenAI in September.
“This is wild and totally unexpected,” Elvis Saravia, an AI researcher and co-founder of the UK-based AI consulting firm DAIR.AI, wrote on X.
R1 stands out for another reason. DeepSeek, the start-up in Hangzhou that built the model, has released it as ‘open-weight’, meaning that researchers can study and build on the algorithm. Published under an MIT licence, the model can be freely reused but is not considered fully open source, because its training data has not been made available.
“The openness of DeepSeek is quite remarkable,” says Mario Krenn, leader of the Artificial Scientist Lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany. By comparison, o1 and other models built by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, including its latest effort o3 are “essentially black boxes”, he says.
DeepSeek hasn’t released the full cost of training R1, but it is charging people using its interface around one-thirtieth of what o1 costs to run. The firm has also created mini ‘distilled’ versions of R1 to allow researchers with limited computing power to play with the model. An “experiment that cost more than £300 with o1, cost less than $10 with R1,” says Krenn. “This is a dramatic difference which will certainly play a role its future adoption.”
Regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) has become very topical in the last couple of years. There was an AI safety summit in November 2023 at Bletchley Park in the UK (see my November 2, 2023 posting for more about that international meeting).
A very software approach?
This year (2024) has seen a rise in legislative and proposed legislative activity. I have some articles on a few of these activities. China was the first to enact regulations of any kind on AI according to Matt Sheehan’s February 27, 2024 paper for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
In 2021 and 2022, China became the first country to implement detailed, binding regulations on some of the most common applications of artificial intelligence (AI). These rules formed the foundation of China’s emerging AI governance regime, an evolving policy architecture that will affect everything from frontier AI research to the functioning of the world’s second-largest economy, from large language models in Africa to autonomous vehicles in Europe.
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The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese government started that process with the 2021 rules on recommendation algorithms, an omnipresent use of the technology that is often overlooked in international AI governance discourse. Those rules imposed new obligations on companies to intervene in content recommendations, granted new rights to users being recommended content, and offered protections to gig workers subject to algorithmic scheduling. The Chinese party-state quickly followed up with a new regulation on “deep synthesis,” the use of AI to generate synthetic media such as deepfakes. Those rules required AI providers to watermark AI-generated content and ensure that content does not violate people’s “likeness rights” or harm the “nation’s image.” Together, these two regulations also created and amended China’s algorithm registry, a regulatory tool that would evolve into a cornerstone of the country’s AI governance regime.
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The UK has adopted a more generalized approach focused on encouraging innovation according to Valeria Gallo’s and Suchitra Nair’s February 21, 2024 article for Deloitte (a British professional services firm also considered one of the big four accounting firms worldwide),
At a glance
The UK Government has adopted a cross-sector and outcome-based framework for regulating AI, underpinned by five core principles. These are safety, security and robustness, appropriate transparency and explainability, fairness, accountability and governance, and contestability and redress.
Regulators will implement the framework in their sectors/domains by applying existing laws and issuing supplementary regulatory guidance. Selected regulators will publish their AI annual strategic plans by 30th April [2024], providing businesses with much-needed direction.
Voluntary safety and transparency measures for developers of highly capable AI models and systems will also supplement the framework and the activities of individual regulators.
The framework will not be codified into law for now, but the Government anticipates the need for targeted legislative interventions in the future. These interventions will address gaps in the current regulatory framework, particularly regarding the risks posed by complex General Purpose AI and the key players involved in its development.
Organisations must prepare for increased AI regulatory activity over the next year, including guidelines, information gathering, and enforcement. International firms will inevitably have to navigate regulatory divergence.
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While most of the focus appears to be on the software (e.g., General Purpose AI), the UK framework does not preclude hardware.
As part of its digital strategy, the EU wants to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure better conditions for the development and use of this innovative technology. AI can create many benefits, such as better healthcare; safer and cleaner transport; more efficient manufacturing; and cheaper and more sustainable energy.
In April 2021, the European Commission proposed the first EU regulatory framework for AI. It says that AI systems that can be used in different applications are analysed and classified according to the risk they pose to users. The different risk levels will mean more or less regulation.
The agreed text is expected to be finally adopted in April 2024. It will be fully applicable 24 months after entry into force, but some parts will be applicable sooner:
*The ban of AI systems posing unacceptable risks will apply six months after the entry into force
*Codes of practice will apply nine months after entry into force
*Rules on general-purpose AI systems that need to comply with transparency requirements will apply 12 months after the entry into force
High-risk systems will have more time to comply with the requirements as the obligations concerning them will become applicable 36 months after the entry into force.
…
This EU initiative, like the UK framework, seems largely focused on AI software and according to the Wikipedia entry “Regulation of artificial intelligence,”
… The AI Act is expected to come into effect in late 2025 or early 2026.[109
I do have a few postings about Canadian regulatory efforts, which also seem to be focused on software but don’t preclude hardware. While the January 20, 2024 posting is titled “Canada’s voluntary code of conduct relating to advanced generative AI (artificial intelligence) systems,” information about legislative efforts is also included although you might find my May 1, 2023 posting titled “Canada, AI regulation, and the second reading of the Digital Charter Implementation Act, 2022 (Bill C-27)” offers more comprehensive information about Canada’s legislative progress or lack thereof.
A February 15, 2024 news item on ScienceDaily suggests that regulating hardware may be the most effective way of regulating AI,
Chips and datacentres — the ‘compute’ power driving the AI revolution — may be the most effective targets for risk-reducing AI policies as they have to be physically possessed, according to a new report.
A global registry tracking the flow of chips destined for AI supercomputers is one of the policy options highlighted by a major new report calling for regulation of “compute” — the hardware that underpins all AI — to help prevent artificial intelligence misuse and disasters.
Other technical proposals floated by the report include “compute caps” — built-in limits to the number of chips each AI chip can connect with — and distributing a “start switch” for AI training across multiple parties to allow for a digital veto of risky AI before it feeds on data.
The experts point out that powerful computing chips required to drive generative AI models are constructed via highly concentrated supply chains, dominated by just a handful of companies — making the hardware itself a strong intervention point for risk-reducing AI policies.
The report, published 14 February [2024], is authored by nineteen experts and co-led by three University of Cambridge institutes — the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI), the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) and the Bennett Institute for Public Policy — along with OpenAI and the Centre for the Governance of AI.
“Artificial intelligence has made startling progress in the last decade, much of which has been enabled by the sharp increase in computing power applied to training algorithms,” said Haydn Belfield, a co-lead author of the report from Cambridge’s LCFI.
“Governments are rightly concerned about the potential consequences of AI, and looking at how to regulate the technology, but data and algorithms are intangible and difficult to control.
“AI supercomputers consist of tens of thousands of networked AI chips hosted in giant data centres often the size of several football fields, consuming dozens of megawatts of power,” said Belfield.
“Computing hardware is visible, quantifiable, and its physical nature means restrictions can be imposed in a way that might soon be nearly impossible with more virtual elements of AI.”
The computing power behind AI has grown exponentially since the “deep learning era” kicked off in earnest, with the amount of “compute” used to train the largest AI models doubling around every six months since 2010. The biggest AI models now use 350 million times more compute than thirteen years ago.
Government efforts across the world over the past year – including the US Executive Order on AI, EU AI Act, China’s Generative AI Regulation, and the UK’s AI Safety Institute – have begun to focus on compute when considering AI governance.
Outside of China, the cloud compute market is dominated by three companies, termed “hyperscalers”: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. “Monitoring the hardware would greatly help competition authorities in keeping in check the market power of the biggest tech companies, and so opening the space for more innovation and new entrants,” said co-author Prof Diane Coyle from Cambridge’s Bennett Institute.
The report provides “sketches” of possible directions for compute governance, highlighting the analogy between AI training and uranium enrichment. “International regulation of nuclear supplies focuses on a vital input that has to go through a lengthy, difficult and expensive process,” said Belfield. “A focus on compute would allow AI regulation to do the same.”
Policy ideas are divided into three camps: increasing the global visibility of AI computing; allocating compute resources for the greatest benefit to society; enforcing restrictions on computing power.
For example, a regularly-audited international AI chip registry requiring chip producers, sellers, and resellers to report all transfers would provide precise information on the amount of compute possessed by nations and corporations at any one time.
The report even suggests a unique identifier could be added to each chip to prevent industrial espionage and “chip smuggling”.
“Governments already track many economic transactions, so it makes sense to increase monitoring of a commodity as rare and powerful as an advanced AI chip,” said Belfield. However, the team point out that such approaches could lead to a black market in untraceable “ghost chips”.
Other suggestions to increase visibility – and accountability – include reporting of large-scale AI training by cloud computing providers, and privacy-preserving “workload monitoring” to help prevent an arms race if massive compute investments are made without enough transparency.
“Users of compute will engage in a mixture of beneficial, benign and harmful activities, and determined groups will find ways to circumvent restrictions,” said Belfield. “Regulators will need to create checks and balances that thwart malicious or misguided uses of AI computing.”
These might include physical limits on chip-to-chip networking, or cryptographic technology that allows for remote disabling of AI chips in extreme circumstances. One suggested approach would require the consent of multiple parties to unlock AI compute for particularly risky training runs, a mechanism familiar from nuclear weapons.
AI risk mitigation policies might see compute prioritised for research most likely to benefit society – from green energy to health and education. This could even take the form of major international AI “megaprojects” that tackle global issues by pooling compute resources.
The report’s authors are clear that their policy suggestions are “exploratory” rather than fully fledged proposals and that they all carry potential downsides, from risks of proprietary data leaks to negative economic impacts and the hampering of positive AI development.
They offer five considerations for regulating AI through compute, including the exclusion of small-scale and non-AI computing, regular revisiting of compute thresholds, and a focus on privacy preservation.
Added Belfield: “Trying to govern AI models as they are deployed could prove futile, like chasing shadows. Those seeking to establish AI regulation should look upstream to compute, the source of the power driving the AI revolution. If compute remains ungoverned it poses severe risks to society.”
Authors include: Girish Sastry, Lennart Heim, Haydn Belfield, Markus Anderljung, Miles Brundage, Julian Hazell, Cullen O’Keefe, Gillian K. Hadfield, Richard Ngo, Konstantin Pilz, George Gor, Emma Bluemke, Sarah Shoker, Janet Egan, Robert F. Trager, Shahar Avin, Adrian Weller, Yoshua Bengio, and Diane Coyle.
The authors are associated with these companies/agencies: OpenAI, Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI), Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the Uni. of Cambridge, Oxford Internet Institute, Institute for Law & AI, University of Toronto Vector Institute for AI, Georgetown University, ILINA Program, Harvard Kennedy School (of Government), *AI Governance Institute,* Uni. of Oxford, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Uni. of Cambridge, Uni. of Cambridge, Uni. of Montreal / Mila, Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the Uni. of Cambridge.
“The ILINIA program is dedicated to providing an outstanding platform for Africans to learn and work on questions around maximizing wellbeing and responding to global catastrophic risks” according to the organization’s homepage.
*As for the AI Governance Institute, I believe that should be the Centre for the Governance of AI at Oxford University since the associated academic is Robert F. Trager from the University of Oxford.
As the months (years?) fly by, I guess we’ll find out if this hardware approach gains any traction where AI regulation is concerned.
Charles Lieber, professor at Harvard University and one of the world’s leading researchers in nanotechnology went on trial on Tuesday, December 14, 2021.
Accused of hiding his ties to a People’s Republic of China (PRC)-run recruitment programme, Lieber is probably the highest profile academic and one of the few who was not born in China or has familial origins in China to be charged under the auspices of the US Department of Justice’s ‘China Initiative’.
This US National Public Radio (NPR) December 14, 2021 audio excerpt provides a brief summary of the situation by Ryan Lucas,
A December 14, 2021 article by Jess Aloe, Eileen Guo, and Antonio Regalado for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review lays out the situation in more detail (Note: A link has been removed),
In January of 2020, agents arrived at Harvard University looking for Charles Lieber, a renowned nanotechnology researcher who chaired the school’s department of chemistry and chemical biology. They were there to arrest him on charges of hiding his financial ties with a university in China. By arresting Lieber steps from Harvard Yard, authorities were sending a loud message to the academic community: failing to disclose such links is a serious crime.
Now Lieber is set to go on trial beginning December 14 [2021] in federal court in Boston. He has pleaded not guilty, and hundreds of academics have signed letters of support. In fact, some critics say it’s the Justice Department’s China Initiative—a far-reaching effort started in 2018 to combat Chinese economic espionage and trade-secret theft—that should be on trial, not Lieber. They are calling the prosecutions fundamentally flawed, a witch hunt that misunderstands the open-book nature of basic science and that is selectively destroying scientific careers over financial misdeeds and paperwork errors without proof of actual espionage or stolen technology.
For their part, prosecutors believe they have a tight case. They allege that Lieber was recruited into China’s Thousand Talents Plan—a program aimed at attracting top scientists—and paid handsomely to establish a research laboratory at the Wuhan University of Technology, but hid the affiliation from US grant agencies when asked about it (read a copy of the indictment here). Lieber is facing six felony charges: two counts of making false statements to investigators, two counts of filing a false tax return, and two counts of failing to report a foreign bank account. [emphases mine; Note: None of these charges have been proved in court]
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The case against Lieber could be a bellwether for the government, which has several similar cases pending against US professors alleging that they didn’t disclose their China affiliations to granting agencies.
The China Initiative was announced in 2018 by Jeff Sessions, then the Trump administration’s attorney general, as a central component of the administration’s tough stance toward China.
An MIT Technology Review investigation published earlier this month [December 2021] found that the China Initiative is an umbrella for various types of prosecutions somehow connected to China, with targets ranging from a Chinese national who ran a turtle-smuggling ring to state-sponsored hackers believed to be behind some of the biggest data breaches in history. In total, MIT Technology Review identified 77 cases brought under the initiative; of those, a quarter have led to guilty pleas or convictions, but nearly two-thirds remain pending.
The government’s prosecution of researchers like Lieber for allegedly hiding ties to Chinese institutions has been the most controversial, and fastest-growing, aspect of the government’s efforts. In 2020, half of the 31 new cases brought under the China Initiative were cases against scientists or researchers. These cases largely did not accuse the defendants of violating the Economic Espionage Act.
… hundreds of academics across the country, from institutions including Stanford University and Princeton University,signed a letter calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to end the China Initiative. The initiative, they wrote, has drifted from its original mission of combating Chinese intellectual-property theft and is instead harming American research competitiveness by discouraging scholars from coming to or staying in the US.
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Lieber’s case is the second [emphasis mine] China Initiative prosecution of an academic to end up in the courtroom. The only previous person to face trial [emphasis mine] on research integrity charges, University of Tennessee–Knoxville professor Anming Hu, was acquitted of all charges [emphasis mine] by a judge in June [2021] after a deadlocked jury led to a mistrial.
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Ken Dilanian wrote an October 19, 2021 article for (US) National Broadcasting Corporation’s (NBC) news online about Hu’s eventual acquittal and about the China Inititative (Note: Dilanian’s timeline for the acquittal differs from the timeline in the MIT Technology Review),
The federal government brought the full measure of its legal might against Anming Hu, a nanotechnology expert at the University of Tennessee.
…
But the Justice Department’s efforts to convict Hu as part of its program to crack down on illicit technology transfer to China failed — spectacularly. A judge acquitted him last month [September 2021] after a lengthy trial offered little evidence of anything other than a paperwork misunderstanding, according to local newspaper coverage. It was the second trial, after the first ended in a hung jury.
…
“The China Initiative has turned up very little by way of clear espionage and the transfer of genuinely strategic information to the PRC,” said Robert Daly, a China expert at the Wilson Center, referring to the country by its formal name, the People’s Republic of China. “They are mostly process crimes, disclosure issues. A growing number of voices are calling for an end to the China initiative because it’s seen as discriminatory.”
The China Initiative began under President Donald Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, in 2018. But concerns about Chinese espionage in the United States — and the transfer of technology to China through business and academic relationships — are bipartisan.
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John Demers, who departed in June [2021] as head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said in an interview that the problem of technology transfer at universities is real. But he said he also believes conflict of interest and disclosure rules were not rigorously enforced for many years. For that reason, he recommended an amnesty program offering academics with undisclosed foreign ties a chance to come clean and avoid penalties. So far, the Biden administration has not implemented such a program.
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When I first featured the Lieber case in a January 28, 2020 posting I was more focused on the financial elements,
ETA January 28, 2020 at 1645 hours: I found a January 28, 2020 article by Antonio Regalado for the MIT Technology Review which provides a few more details about Lieber’s situation,
“…
Big money: According to the charging document, Lieber, starting in 2011, agreed to help set up a research lab at the Wuhan University of Technology and “make strategic visionary and creative research proposals” so that China could do cutting-edge science.
He was well paid for it. Lieber earned a salary when he visited China worth up to $50,000 per month, as well as $150,000 a year in expenses in addition to research funds. According to the complaint, he got paid by way of a Chinese bank account but also was known to send emails asking for cash instead.
Harvard eventually wised up to the existence of a Wuhan lab using its name and logo, but when administrators confronted Lieber, he lied and said he didn’t know about a formal joint program, according to the government complaint.
…
This is messy not least because Lieber and the members of his Harvard lab have done some extraordinary work as per my November 15, 2019 (Human-machine interfaces and ultra-small nanoprobes) posting about injectable electronics.
Regardless of what these shoes are called, they contain, apparently, some graphene. As to why you as a consumer might find that important, here’s more from a June 20, 2018 news item on Nanowerk,
The world’s first-ever sports shoes to utilise graphene – the strongest material on the planet – have been unveiled by The University of Manchester and British brand inov-8.
Collaborating with graphene experts at National Graphene Institute, the brand has been able to develop a graphene-enhanced rubber. They have developed rubber outsoles for running and fitness shoes that in testing have outlasted 1,000 miles and are scientifically proven to be 50% harder wearing.
The National Graphene Institute (located at the UK’s University of Manchester) June 20, 2018 press release, which originated the news item, provides a few details, none of them particularly technical or scientific, no mention of studies, etc. (Note: Links have been removed),
Graphene is 200 times stronger than steel and at only a single atom thick it is the thinnest possible material, meaning it has many unique properties. inov-8 is the first brand in the world to use the superlative material in sports footwear, with its G-SERIES shoes available to pre-order from June 22nd [2018] ahead of going on sale from July 12th [2018].
The company first announced its intent to revolutionise the sports footwear industry in December last year. Six months of frenzied anticipation later, inov-8 has now removed all secrecy and let the world see these game-changing shoes.
Michael Price, inov-8 product and marketing director, said: “Over the last 18 months we have worked with the National Graphene Institute at The University of Manchester to bring the world’s toughest grip to the sports footwear market.
“Prior to this innovation, off-road runners and fitness athletes had to choose between a sticky rubber that works well in wet or sweaty conditions but wears down quicker and a harder rubber that is more durable but not quite as grippy. Through intensive research, hundreds of prototypes and thousands of hours of testing in both the field and laboratory, athletes now no longer need to compromise.”
Dr Aravind Vijayaraghavan, Reader in Nanomaterials at The University of Manchester, said: “Using graphene we have developed G-SERIES outsole rubbers that are scientifically tested to be 50% stronger, 50% more elastic and 50% harder wearing.
“We are delighted to put graphene on the shelves of 250 retail stores all over the world and make it accessible to everyone. Graphene is a versatile material with limitless potential and in coming years we expect to deliver graphene technologies in composites, coatings and sensors, many of which will further revolutionise sports products.”
The G-SERIES range is made up of three different shoes, each meticulously designed to meet the needs of athletes. THE MUDCLAW G 260 is for running over muddy mountains and obstacle courses, the TERRAULTRA G 260 for running long distances on hard-packed trails and the F-LITE G 290 for crossfitters working out in gyms. Each includes graphene-enhanced rubber outsoles and Kevlar – a material used in bulletproof vests – on the uppers.
Commenting on the patent-pending technology and the collaboration with The University of Manchester, inov-8 CEO Ian Bailey said: “This powerhouse forged in Northern England is going to take the world of sports footwear by storm. We’re combining science and innovation together with entrepreneurial speed and agility to go up against the major sports brands – and we’re going to win.
“We are at the forefront of a graphene sports footwear revolution and we’re not stopping at just rubber outsoles. This is a four-year innovation project which will see us incorporate graphene into 50% of our range and give us the potential to halve the weight of running/fitness shoes without compromising on performance or durability.”
Graphene is produced from graphite, which was first mined in the Lake District fells of Northern England more than 450 years ago. inov-8 too was forged in the same fells, albeit much more recently in 2003. The brand now trades in 68 countries worldwide.
The scientists who first isolated graphene from graphite were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010. Building on their revolutionary work, a team of over 300 staff at The University of Manchester has pioneered projects into graphene-enhanced prototypes, from sports cars and medical devices to aeroplanes. Now the University can add graphene-enhanced sports footwear to its list of world-firsts.
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A picture of the ‘shoes’ has been provided,
Courtesy: National Graphene Institute at University of Manchester
You can find the company inov-8 here. As for more information about their graphene-enhanced show, there’s this,from the company’s ‘graphene webpage‘,
1555Graphite was first mined in the Lake District fells of Northern England
2004Scientists at The University of Manchester isolate graphene from graphite.
2010The Nobel Prize is awarded to the scientists for their ground-breaking experiments with graphene.
2018inov-8 launch the first-ever sports footwear to utilise graphene, delivering the world’s toughest grip.
Ground-breaking technology
One atom thick carbon sheet
200 x stronger than steel
Thin, light, flexible, with limitless potential
inov-8 COLLABORATION WITH THE NATIONAL GRAPHENE INSTITUTE
Previously athletes had to choose between a sticky rubber that works well in wet or sweaty conditions but wears down quicker, and a harder rubber that is more durable but not quite as grippy. Through intensive research, hundreds of prototypes and thousands of hours of testing in both the field and laboratory, athletes now no longer need to compromise. The new rubber we have developed with the National Graphene Institute at The University of Manchester allows us to smash the limits of grip [sic]
The G-SERIES range is made up of three different shoes, each meticulously designed to meet the needs of athletes. Each includes graphene-enhanced rubber outsoles that deliver the world’s toughest grip and Kevlar – a material used in bulletproof vests – on the uppers.
Bulletproof material for running shoes?
As for Canadians eager to try out these shoes, you will likely have to go online or go to the US. Given how recently (June 19, 2018) this occurred, I’m mentioning the US president’s (Donald Trump) comments that Canadians are notorious for buying shoes in the US and smuggling them across the border back into Canada. (Revelatory information for Canadians everywhere.) His bizarre comments occasioned this explanatory June 19, 2018 article by Jordan Weissmann for Slate.com,
During a characteristically rambling address before the National Federation of Independent Businesses on Tuesday [June 19, 2018], Donald Trump darted off into an odd tangent in which he suggested that Canadians were smuggling shoes across the U.S. border in order to avoid their country’s high tariffs.
There was a story two days ago in a major newspaper talking about people living in Canada coming into the United States and smuggling things back into Canada because the tariffs are so massive. The tariffs to get common items back into Canada are so high that they have to smuggle ‘em in. They buy shoes, then they wear ‘em. They scuff ‘em up. They make ‘em sound old or look old. No, we’re treated horribly. [emphasis mine]
Anyone engaged in this alleged practice would be avoiding payment to the Canadian government. How this constitutes poor treatment of the US government and/or US retailers is a bit a of puzzler.
Getting back to Weissman and his article, he focuses on the source of the US president’s ‘information’.
As for graphene-enhanced ‘shoes’, I hope they are as advertized.
The days when you went cruising to ‘get away from it all’ seem to have passed (if they ever really existed) with the introduction of wearable technology that will register your every preference and make life easier according to Cliff Kuang’s Oct. 19, 2017 article for Fast Company,
This month [October 2017], the 141,000-ton Regal Princess will push out to sea after a nine-figure revamp of mind-boggling scale. Passengers won’t be greeted by new restaurants, swimming pools, or onboard activities, but will instead step into a future augured by the likes of Netflix and Uber, where nearly everything is on demand and personally tailored. An ambitious new customization platform has been woven into the ship’s 19 passenger decks: some 7,000 onboard sensors and 4,000 “guest portals” (door-access panels and touch-screen TVs), all of them connected by 75 miles of internal cabling. As the Carnival-owned ship cruises to Nassau, Bahamas, and Grand Turk, its 3,500 passengers will have the option of carrying a quarter-size device, called the Ocean Medallion, which can be slipped into a pocket or worn on the wrist and is synced with a companion app.
The platform will provide a new level of service for passengers; the onboard sensors record their tastes and respond to their movements, and the app guides them around the ship and toward activities aligned with their preferences. Carnival plans to roll out the platform to another seven ships by January 2019. Eventually, the Ocean Medallion could be opening doors, ordering drinks, and scheduling activities for passengers on all 102 of Carnival’s vessels across 10 cruise lines, from the mass-market Princess ships to the legendary ocean liners of Cunard.
Kuang goes on to explain the reasoning behind this innovation,
The Ocean Medallion is Carnival’s attempt to address a problem that’s become increasingly vexing to the $35.5 billion cruise industry. Driven by economics, ships have exploded in size: In 1996, Carnival Destiny was the world’s largest cruise ship, carrying 2,600 passengers. Today, Royal Caribbean’s MS Harmony of the Seas carries up to 6,780 passengers and 2,300 crew. Larger ships expend less fuel per passenger; the money saved can then go to adding more amenities—which, in turn, are geared to attracting as many types of people as possible. Today on a typical ship you can do practically anything—from attending violin concertos to bungee jumping. And that’s just onboard. Most of a cruise is spent in port, where each day there are dozens of experiences available. This avalanche of choice can bury a passenger. It has also made personalized service harder to deliver. …
Kuang also wrote this brief description of how the technology works from the passenger’s perspective in an Oct. 19, 2017 item for Fast Company,
1. Pre-trip
On the web or on the app, you can book experiences, log your tastes and interests, and line up your days. That data powers the recommendations you’ll see. The Ocean Medallion arrives by mail and becomes the key to ship access.
2. Stateroom
When you draw near, your cabin-room door unlocks without swiping. The room’s unique 43-inch TV, which doubles as a touch screen, offers a range of Carnival’s bespoke travel shows. Whatever you watch is fed into your excursion suggestions.
3. Food
When you order something, sensors detect where you are, allowing your server to find you. Your allergies and preferences are also tracked, and shape the choices you’re offered. In all, the back-end data has 45,000 allergens tagged and manages 250,000 drink combinations.
4. Activities
The right algorithms can go beyond suggesting wines based on previous orders. Carnival is creating a massive semantic database, so if you like pricey reds, you’re more apt to be guided to a violin concerto than a limbo competition. Your onboard choices—the casino, the gym, the pool—inform your excursion recommendations.
In Kuang’s Oct. 19, 2017 article he notes that the cruise ship line is putting a lot of effort into retraining their staff and emphasizing the ‘soft’ skills that aren’t going to be found in this iteration of the technology. No mention is made of whether or not there will be reductions in the number of staff members on this cruise ship nor is the possibility that ‘soft’ skills may in the future be incorporated into this technological marvel.
Personalization/customization is increasingly everywhere
How do you feel about customized news feeds? As it turns out, this is not a rhetorical question as Adrienne LaFrance notes in her Oct. 19, 2017 article for The Atlantic (Note: Links have been removed),
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Today, a Google search for news runs through the same algorithmic filtration system as any other Google search: A person’s individual search history, geographic location, and other demographic information affects what Google shows you. Exactly how your search results differ from any other person’s is a mystery, however. Not even the computer scientists who developed the algorithm could precisely reverse engineer it, given the fact that the same result can be achieved through numerous paths, and that ranking factors—deciding which results show up first—are constantly changing, as are the algorithms themselves.
We now get our news in real time, on demand, tailored to our interests, across multiple platforms, without knowing just how much is actually personalized. It was technology companies like Google and Facebook, not traditional newsrooms, that made it so. But news organizations are increasingly betting that offering personalized content can help them draw audiences to their sites—and keep them coming back.
Personalization extends beyond how and where news organizations meet their readers. Already, smartphone users can subscribe to push notifications for the specific coverage areas that interest them. On Facebook, users can decide—to some extent—which organizations’ stories they would like to appear in their news feeds. At the same time, devices and platforms that use machine learning to get to know their users will increasingly play a role in shaping ultra-personalized news products. Meanwhile, voice-activated artificially intelligent devices, such as Google Home and Amazon Echo, are poised to redefine the relationship between news consumers and the news [emphasis mine].
While news personalization can help people manage information overload by making individuals’ news diets unique, it also threatens to incite filter bubbles and, in turn, bias [emphasis mine]. This “creates a bit of an echo chamber,” says Judith Donath, author of The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online and a researcher affiliated with Harvard University ’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. “You get news that is designed to be palatable to you. It feeds into people’s appetite of expecting the news to be entertaining … [and] the desire to have news that’s reinforcing your beliefs, as opposed to teaching you about what’s happening in the world and helping you predict the future better.”
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Still, algorithms have a place in responsible journalism. “An algorithm actually is the modern editorial tool,” says Tamar Charney, the managing editor of NPR One, the organization’s customizable mobile-listening app. A handcrafted hub for audio content from both local and national programs as well as podcasts from sources other than NPR, NPR One employs an algorithm to help populate users’ streams with content that is likely to interest them. But Charney assures there’s still a human hand involved: “The whole editorial vision of NPR One was to take the best of what humans do and take the best of what algorithms do and marry them together.” [emphasis mine]
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The skimming and diving Charney describes sounds almost exactly like how Apple and Google approach their distributed-content platforms. With Apple News, users can decide which outlets and topics they are most interested in seeing, with Siri offering suggestions as the algorithm gets better at understanding your preferences. Siri now has have help from Safari. The personal assistant can now detect browser history and suggest news items based on what someone’s been looking at—for example, if someone is searching Safari for Reykjavík-related travel information, they will then see Iceland-related news on Apple News. But the For You view of Apple News isn’t 100 percent customizable, as it still spotlights top stories of the day, and trending stories that are popular with other users, alongside those curated just for you.
Similarly, with Google’s latest update to Google News, readers can scan fixed headlines, customize sidebars on the page to their core interests and location—and, of course, search. The latest redesign of Google News makes it look newsier than ever, and adds to many of the personalization features Google first introduced in 2010. There’s also a place where you can preprogram your own interests into the algorithm.
Google says this isn’t an attempt to supplant news organizations, nor is it inspired by them. The design is rather an embodiment of Google’s original ethos, the product manager for Google News Anand Paka says: “Just due to the deluge of information, users do want ways to control information overload. In other words, why should I read the news that I don’t care about?” [emphasis mine]
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Meanwhile, in May [2017?], Google briefly tested a personalized search filter that would dip into its trove of data about users with personal Google and Gmail accounts and include results exclusively from their emails, photos, calendar items, and other personal data related to their query. [emphasis mine] The “personal” tab was supposedly “just an experiment,” a Google spokesperson said, and the option was temporarily removed, but seems to have rolled back out for many users as of August [2017?].
Now, Google, in seeking to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that scanning emails to offer targeted ads amounts to illegal wiretapping, is promising that for the next three years it won’t use the content of its users’ emails to serve up targeted ads in Gmail. The move, which will go into effect at an unspecified date, doesn’t mean users won’t see ads, however. Google will continue to collect data from users’ search histories, YouTube, and Chrome browsing habits, and other activity.
The fear that personalization will encourage filter bubbles by narrowing the selection of stories is a valid one, especially considering that the average internet user or news consumer might not even be aware of such efforts. Elia Powers, an assistant professor of journalism and news media at Towson University in Maryland, studied the awareness of news personalization among students after he noticed those in his own classes didn’t seem to realize the extent to which Facebook and Google customized users’ results. “My sense is that they didn’t really understand … the role that people that were curating the algorithms [had], how influential that was. And they also didn’t understand that they could play a pretty active role on Facebook in telling Facebook what kinds of news they want them to show and how to prioritize [content] on Google,” he says.
The results of Powers’s study, which was published in Digital Journalism in February [2017], showed that the majority of students had no idea that algorithms were filtering the news content they saw on Facebook and Google. When asked if Facebook shows every news item, posted by organizations or people, in a users’ newsfeed, only 24 percent of those surveyed were aware that Facebook prioritizes certain posts and hides others. Similarly, only a quarter of respondents said Google search results would be different for two different people entering the same search terms at the same time. [emphasis mine; Note: Respondents in this study were students.]
This, of course, has implications beyond the classroom, says Powers: “People as news consumers need to be aware of what decisions are being made [for them], before they even open their news sites, by algorithms and the people behind them, and also be able to understand how they can counter the effects or maybe even turn off personalization or make tweaks to their feeds or their news sites so they take a more active role in actually seeing what they want to see in their feeds.”
On Google and Facebook, the algorithm that determines what you see is invisible. With voice-activated assistants, the algorithm suddenly has a persona. “We are being trained to have a relationship with the AI,” says Amy Webb, founder of the Future Today Institute and an adjunct professor at New York University Stern School of Business. “This is so much more catastrophically horrible for news organizations than the internet. At least with the internet, I have options. The voice ecosystem is not built that way. It’s being built so I just get the information I need in a pleasing way.”
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LaFrance’s article is thoughtful and well worth reading in its entirety. Now, onto some commentary.
Loss of personal agency
I have been concerned for some time about the increasingly dull results I get from a Google search and while I realize the company has been gathering information about me via my searches , supposedly in service of giving me better searches, I had no idea how deeply the company can mine for personal data. It makes me wonder what would happen if Google and Facebook attempted a merger.
More cogently, I rather resent the search engines and artificial intelligence agents (e.g. Facebook bots) which have usurped my role as the arbiter of what interests me, in short, my increasing loss of personal agency.
I’m also deeply suspicious of what these companies are going to do with my data. Will it be used to manipulate me in some way? Presumably, the data will be sold and used for some purpose. In the US, they have married electoral data with consumer data as Brent Bambury notes in an Oct. 13, 2017 article for his CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Radio show,
How much of your personal information circulates in the free-market ether of metadata? It could be more than you imagine, and it might be enough to let others change the way you vote.
A data firm that specializes in creating psychological profiles of voters claims to have up to 5,000 data points on 220 million Americans. Cambridge Analytica has deep ties to the American right and was hired by the campaigns of Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.
During the U.S. election, CNN called them “Donald Trump’s mind readers” and his secret weapon.
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David Carroll is a Professor at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. He is one of the millions of Americans profiled by Cambridge Analytica and he’s taking legal action to find out where the company gets its masses of data and how they use it to create their vaunted psychographic profiles of voters.
On Day 6 [Banbury’s CBC radio programme], he explained why that’s important.
“They claim to have figured out how to project our voting behavior based on our consumer behavior. So it’s important for citizens to be able to understand this because it would affect our ability to understand how we’re being targeted by campaigns and how the messages that we’re seeing on Facebook and television are being directed at us to manipulate us.” [emphasis mine]
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The parent company of Cambridge Analytica, SCL Group, is a U.K.-based data operation with global ties to military and political activities. David Carroll says the potential for sharing personal data internationally is a cause for concern.
“It’s the first time that this kind of data is being collected and transferred across geographic boundaries,” he says.
But that also gives Carroll an opening for legal action. An individual has more rights to access their personal information in the U.K., so that’s where he’s launching his lawsuit.
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Reports link Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s National Security Adviser, to SCL Group and indicate that former White House strategist Steve Bannon is a board member of Cambridge Analytica. Billionaire Robert Mercer, who has underwritten Bannon’s Breitbart operations and is a major Trump donor, also has a significant stake in Cambridge Analytica.
In the world of data, Mercer’s credentials are impeccable.
“He is an important contributor to the field of artificial intelligence,” says David Carroll.
“His work at IBM is seminal and really important in terms of the foundational ideas that go into big data analytics, so the relationship between AI and big data analytics. …
Banbury’s piece offers a lot more, including embedded videos, than I’ve not included in that excerpt but I also wanted to include some material from Carole Cadwalladr’s Oct. 1, 2017 Guardian article about Carroll and his legal fight in the UK,
“There are so many disturbing aspects to this. One of the things that really troubles me is how the company can buy anonymous data completely legally from all these different sources, but as soon as it attaches it to voter files, you are re-identified. It means that every privacy policy we have ignored in our use of technology is a broken promise. It would be one thing if this information stayed in the US, if it was an American company and it only did voter data stuff.”
But, he [Carroll] argues, “it’s not just a US company and it’s not just a civilian company”. Instead, he says, it has ties with the military through SCL – “and it doesn’t just do voter targeting”. Carroll has provided information to the Senate intelligence committee and believes that the disclosures mandated by a British court could provide evidence helpful to investigators.
Frank Pasquale, a law professor at the University of Maryland, author of The Black Box Society and a leading expert on big data and the law, called the case a “watershed moment”.
“It really is a David and Goliath fight and I think it will be the model for other citizens’ actions against other big corporations. I think we will look back and see it as a really significant case in terms of the future of algorithmic accountability and data protection. …
Nobody is discussing personal agency directly but if you’re only being exposed to certain kinds of messages then your personal agency has been taken from you. Admittedly we don’t have complete personal agency in our lives but AI along with the data gathering done online and increasingly with wearable and smart technology means that another layer of control has been added to your life and it is largely invisible. After all, the students in Elia Powers’ study didn’t realize their news feeds were being pre-curated.
