DTN 047: Miss America Supports Nuclear Power

The Dubious Economics of Deep-Sea Mining

“The specter of commercial operations has galvanized opponents of deep-sea mining. Far from being barren, the deep ocean floor teems with life, just a fraction of which has been identified; deep-sea ecological dynamics are only hazily understood, but it’s clear that digging nodules from the seabed could be extremely destructive, and ecological recovery may take centuries if it happens at all. The United Nations Environment Programme says that deep-sea mining in its present forms cannot be considered sustainable. That, however, was not the main subject of the presentation delivered by Victor Vescovo, a private equity investor and explorer who has dived to the deepest points of all five oceans. Instead he talked about the extraordinary challenge of operating complex machinery in corrosive salt water at near-freezing temperatures and thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch. “It is an incredibly hostile environment,” he said. “It rips up anything mechanical or electrical almost like it has a will to do so.” This made a mockery, he said, of The Metal Company’s projections: not the $13.1 billion value of metals targeted by their first project, but the $7.1 billion it would cost to retrieve them.” (Nautilus)

In Defense of AI Hallucinations

“Besides providing an instructive view of plausible alternate realities, the untethering of AI outputs from the realm of fact can also be productive. Because LLMs don’t necessarily think like humans, their flights of statistical fancy can be valuable tools to spur creativity. “That’s why generative systems are being explored more by artists, to get ideas they wouldn’t have necessarily have thought of,” says Vectara’s Ahmad. One of the most important missions of those building AI is to help solve humanity’s intractable problems, ostensibly by coming up with ideas that leap past the bounds of human imagination. Ahmad is one of several people I spoke with who believe that even if we figure out how to largely eliminate those algorithmic fibs, we should still keep them around. “LLMs should be capable of producing things without hallucinations, but then we can flip them into a mode where they can produce hallucinations and help us brainstorm,” he says. Vempala of Georgia Tech agrees: “There should be a knob that you can turn,” he says. “When you want to drive your car you don’t want AI to hallucinate what’s on the road, but you do when you’re trying to write a poem for a friend.” (WIRED)