I’m going to become a fantasy meteorologist for this game
]]>Capcom added a 30 fps cap on PS5
]]> IEEE Spectrum:
How the semiconductor industry can reach 1T transistor GPUs, which will be needed within a decade if the AI revolution continues at its current pace — Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom — In 1997 the IBM Deep Blue supercomputer defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
As heartbroken as we are to lose those who mean so much to us, we know they’ve passed on to become one of the Elders and will now protect and take care of us. They are gone but never forgotten. We celebrate their legacies with this look at the Black celebs we’ve lost in 2024.
The world of Super Mario is a dangerous place. In the games, the plumber falls off cliffs, gets jabbed with spikes, and has everything from wrenches to fireballs hurled at him. But he always gets back up and goes again, which raises an important question: does Nintendo’s hero actually feel pain? According to Takashi Tezuka, who has worked on the series since the original Super Mario Bros. (including serving as producer on last year’s Wonder), there isn’t really a clear answer. “It may be that Mario does feel pain,” he tells me.
But that ambiguity may be because I was asking the wrong question. The important part, he explains, is the emotions players experience when Mario plummets to his death or is fried by Bowser’s breath. “If the player feels that Mario is feeling pain, that’s a better experience, rather than talking about whether Mario actually does feel pain,” Tezuka says.
And players can sense that emotion much more in Wonder, with the game’s more detailed and lively animations. Mario’s face contorts in uncomfortable ways when the game over screen pops up and jolts into the air when taking damage from a spiky shell or chomping Piranha Plant. It’s enough to make you wince — which is kind of the point.
“For us, if Mario hits an enemy and the person playing goes ‘ow!’ that’s ideal,” says Tezuka.
]]>The Shazam app for Wear OS just got a neat update: it can now work independently of your Android phone.
The update, which was spotted by 9to5Google, basically removes the need for the wrist app to confer with the app on your phone. You don’t even need the app downloaded on your Android for it to work. I downloaded it directly onto the OnePlus Watch 2 that I’m testing without doing so on the Pixel 8 Pro it’s paired to. It still works! And quickly at that. It was able to correctly identify some bangers on my K-pop playlist within a second or two. (To be fair, there wasn’t any background noise in my office. Your mileage may vary in a coffee shop.)
Another neat update is that if your watch is offline, the app will save a clip of the song and wait until you’ve got an internet connection to identify it. That’s handy if you didn’t spring for a cellular watch — or if, like the OnePlus Watch 2, your Wear OS watch of choice doesn’t have an LTE option. If you do have the Shazam app on your phone, you can also instantly sync your finds. (Just make sure you’re logged in to the same Shazam account.)
I’m a big fan of Shazam-ing from the wrist, so it’s nice to see the Wear OS version of the app get some love.
]]>Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a game filled with oddball ideas. Thanks to magical flowers that, once collected, introduce some unexpected new element, players experience everything from a bunch of Piranha Plants simultaneously bursting into song to Mario turning into a sentient pile of goo. It has so many ideas, in fact, that director Shiro Mouri wasn’t sure the team could pull it off. “At first when I heard that we’d be creating one wonder effect per course, and that all of the courses are going to have different wonder effects,” he tells The Verge, “I thought: ‘That’s stupid. That’s impossible.’”
As it turns out, the problem wasn’t so much coming up with ideas. The developers at Nintendo brainstormed a lot of potential powers — around 2,000, which were jotted down on sticky notes and placed on a big board in the company’s Kyoto office for everyone to see. According to producer Takashi Tezuka, who has worked on the franchise since the original Super Mario Bros., the game had not only a large development team but also an extended ideation process for coming up with those different wonder flower concepts. During this time, no idea was too out there. At one point, Koji Kondo, the famed composer behind the iconic tunes of Mario and Zelda, pitched a flower that would turn Mario into a human-size live-action version of himself. “They had an environment to think freely in and come up with ideas,” Tezuka says of the process.
They were able to whittle down the list by coming up with criteria for what would actually fit the game: for an idea to work, it had to have some kind of connection between the moment before the effect takes place, and it had to be something that impacted the gameplay. So something purely aesthetic, like a bizarre live-action Mario, didn’t fit the bill. Mouri similarly thought up a flower that would make Mario pixelated, but it had the same issue. “While this was my own idea, I was the one who ultimately nixed it,” he says.
Once the list was edited down significantly, the next step was building playable prototypes. To do this, the team split into groups, teaming up an artist, a designer, and a sound artist. “They would create something, and then they would share the idea with the other teams, and people would discuss and combine and add and tweak,” Tezuka says. “The first idea isn’t what we would consider the best idea. It was the basis on which the layers were added by the other teams, that’s what would become the idea that we would use.”
Some ideas were simply cut at this point. One example involved turning Mario’s head into a gigantic 8-bit rendition of itself, but instead of pixels, it was made of bricks… which enemies would then try to eat piece by piece. In practice, there wasn’t much strategy; players simply had to run to the end as fast as they could before their head disappeared. Other ideas morphed during the prototype stage.
One of the earlier levels in Wonder has Mario running on a herd of stampeding blue bulls. In the initial concept, the bull was a rhino that could smash through everything on its way to the end of a level. But that proved too simplistic and easy. “The idea was interesting, which is why we decided to prototype it,” Mouri says. “But once we did prototype it we realized that there was a challenge there.” So, as a twist on the Mario formula, the designers made it so the creatures actually knock over everything, including the flagpole at the end, extending the level further.
That idea of reimagining Super Mario staples was an important part of the process, Tezuka says. While Wonder is very much a 2D side-scrolling game like its predecessors, it also makes many important tweaks to the formula. The map is more open so you can approach stages in different orders, and there are new badges that grant special abilities, letting players customize the experience to their liking. The previously stable green pipes can now wobble and move, and sometimes you can’t even depend on gravity. “We really went through element by element,” Tezuka explains. “Do we need a 1-up system? Do we need a timer? Do we need all of these things that are traditional Mario staples? We looked at and evaluated each one.”
That constant interrogation of what a Super Mario game should be might be part of why the formula hasn’t grown old, despite being around for close to 40 years — and how Wonder, in particular, manages to keep on surprising until the very end. At a time when the plumber is as popular as he’s ever been, with a hit movie and theme parks around the world, his outings also seem to be getting stranger and stranger. “I don’t know if there’s a limit,” Mouri says, when asked if it’s possible for an idea to be too weird for Super Mario. “I think it really comes back to if the gameplay is fun.”
]]>A Mississippi family is reeling from the loss of their 17-year-old son, Kadarius Smith — who they say was chased by a police cruiser and fatally hit on his way home. Now, the family is demanding answers from the local police department.
The family that slays together stays together
]]>The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the toughest US standards yet for greenhouse gas emissions from heavy-duty vehicles like big rigs and buses. The rules apply to model year 2027 to 2032 heavy-duty vehicles and are meant to slash emissions from a major source of the pollution causing climate change.
Heavy-duty vehicles are responsible for a quarter of the nation’s transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions. The EPA says its new standards will avoid a billion tons of those emissions by 2055, which would be like eliminating the pollution from 13 million tanker trucks’ worth of gasoline.
Transportation makes up the biggest chunk of the country’s carbon footprint and has been the target of a series of new regulations aimed at meeting climate goals set under the Biden administration and the Paris climate accord. And since trucks also produce soot and smog-forming pollutants, the latest rules are also expected to improve air quality for 72 million Americans living within 200 meters of a truck freight route.
“On behalf of everyone who breathes, thank you,” Paul Billings, national senior vice president of public policy at the American Lung Association, said during a press call with EPA Administrator Michael Regan. “Thank you, Mr. Administrator, for responding to the comments from health experts and community voices and recognizing the innovation that is occurring every day in the heavy-duty vehicle sector.”
The proposed rule got more than 175,000 comments before being finalized today, including pushback from industry. The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association wrote in its comments last year that the tougher greenhouse gas standards (on top of another recent rule that tightened limits for smog-forming pollution) could inadvertently lead drivers to hang on to older, more polluting trucks longer to avoid higher costs for zero emissions vehicles. The group also said the rule could “rush production of battery electric vehicles” before adequate charging infrastructure is in place.
The Biden administration says its rules are “technology-neutral,” allowing businesses to choose between hybrid, electric, and fuel cell vehicles or “advanced” internal combustion engine vehicles. It also estimates that the fuel and maintenance cost savings would reach between $3,700 and $10,500 annually for a heavy-duty truck purchased in 2032.
Earlier this month, the EPA set out new standards for pollution from light and medium-duty vehicles expected to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles. While those rules are supposed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 50 percent by 2032, they’re more lax than what the Biden administration initially proposed before facing opposition from car companies and labor unions.
]]>Why AI agents that could book your vacation or pay your bills are the next frontier in artificial intelligence.
ChatGPT and its large language model (LLM) competitors that produce text on demand are very cool. So are the other fruits of the generative AI revolution: art generators, music generators, better automatic subtitles and translation.
They can do a lot (including claim that they’re conscious, not that we should believe them), but there’s one important respect in which AI models are unlike people: They are processes that are run only when a human triggers them and only to accomplish a specific result. And then they stop.
Now imagine that you took one of these programs — a really good chatbot, let’s say, but still just a chatbot — and you gave it the ability to write notes to itself, store a to-do list and the status of items on the to-do list, and delegate tasks to other copies of itself or other people. And instead of running only when a human prompted it, you had it work on an ongoing basis on these tasks — just like an actual human assistant.
At that point, without any new leaps in technology whatsoever — just some basic tools glued onto a standard language model — you’d have what is called an “AI agent,” or an AI that acts with independent agency to pursue its goals in the world.
AI agents have been called the “future of artificial intelligence” that will “reinvent the way we live and work,” the “next frontier of AI.” OpenAI is reportedly working on developing such agents, as are many different well-funded startups.
They may sound even more sci-fi than everything else you’ve already heard about AI, but AI agents are not nonsense, and if effective, could fundamentally change how we work.
That said, they currently don’t work very well, and they pose obvious challenges for AI safety. Here’s a quick primer on where we’re (maybe) headed, and why.
Today’s AI chatbots are fun to talk to and useful assistants — if you are willing to overlook a set of limitations that includes making things up. Such models have already found sizable and important economic niches, from art to audio and video transcription (which have been quietly revolutionized over the last few years) to assisting programmers with tools like Copilot. But the investors pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI are hoping for something more transformative than that.
Many people I talk to who use AI in their work describe it as like having a slightly scatterbrained but very fast intern. They do useful work, but you have to define each problem for them and carefully check their work, meaning that much of what you might gain in productivity is lost in oversight.
Much of the economic case for AI is that it could do more than that. The people at work on AI agents hope that their tools won’t just help software developers, but that the tools could be software developers. In this future, you wouldn’t just consult AI for trip planning ideas; instead, you could simply text it “plan a trip for me in Paris next summer,” as you might a really good executive assistant.
Today’s AI agents do not live up to that dream — yet. The problem is that you need a very high accuracy rate on each step of a multistep process, or very good error correction, to get anything valuable out of an agent that has to take lots of steps.
But there’s good reason to expect that future generation AI agents will be much better at what they do. First of all, the agents are built on increasingly powerful base models, which perform much better on a wide range of tasks, and which we can expect to continue to improve. Secondly, we’re also learning more about how to build agents themselves.
A year ago, the first publicly available AI agents — AutoGPT, for example, which was just a very simple agent based on ChatGPT — were basically useless. But a few weeks ago, the startup Cognition Labs released Devin, an AI software engineer that can build and deploy entire small web applications.
Devin is an impressive feat of engineering, and good enough to take some small gigs on Upwork and deliver working code. It had an almost 14 percent success rate on a benchmark that measures ability to resolve issues on the software developer platform GitHub.
That’s a big leap forward for which there’s surely an economic niche — but at best, it’s a very junior software engineer who’d need close supervision by a more senior one. Still, like most things AI, we can expect improvement in the future.
Would it be cool for everyone in the world to have an AI personal assistant who could plan dinner, order groceries, buy a birthday present for your mom, plan a trip to the zoo for the kids, and pay your bills for you while notifying you of any unexpected ones? Yes, absolutely. Would it be incredibly economically valuable to have AI software engineers who can do the work of human software engineers? Yes, absolutely.
But: Is there something potentially worrying about creating agents that can reason and act independently, earn money independently, make copies of themselves independently, and do complex things without human oversight? Oh, definitely.
For one, there are questions of liability. It’d be just as easy to make “scammer” AIs that spend their time convincing the elderly to send them money as it would to make useful agents. Who would be responsible if that happens?
For another, as AI systems get more powerful, the moral quandaries they pose become more pressing. If Devin earns a lot of money as a software engineer, is there a sense that Devin, rather than the team that created him, is entitled to that money? What if Devin’s successors are created by a team that’s made up of hundreds of copies of Devin?
And for those who worry about humanity losing control of our future if we build extremely powerful AI systems without thinking about the consequences (I’m one of them), it’s pretty obvious why the idea of AIs with agency is nerve-racking.
The transition from systems that act only when users consult them to systems that go out and accomplish complex goals in the real world risks what leading AI scientist Yoshua Bengio calls “rogue AI”: “an autonomous AI system that could behave in ways that would be catastrophically harmful.”
Think of it this way: It’s hard to imagine how ChatGPT could kill us, or could even be the kind of thing that would want to. It’s easy to imagine how a hyper-competent AI executive assistant/scam caller/software engineer could.
For that reason, some researchers are trying to develop good tests of the capabilities of AI agents built off different language models, so that we’ll know in advance before we widely release ones that can make money, make copies of themselves, and function independently without oversight.
Others are working to try to set good regulatory policy in advance, including liability rules that might discourage unleashing an army of super-competent scammer-bots.
And while I hope that we have a few years to solve those technical and political challenges, I doubt we’ll have forever. The commercial incentives to make agent AIs are overwhelming, and they can genuinely be extremely useful. We just have to iron out their extraordinary implications — preferably before, rather than after, billions of them exist.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
]]>With diversity, equity, and inclusion programs facing backlash, The Onion examines every problem conservatives have blamed on DEI.
]]> The Information:
Sources: Accel is in talks to lead a round in Scale AI at a $13B valuation, up from $7.3B in 2021; Scale AI generated $675M+ in revenue in 2023, up ~150% YoY — Venture capital firm Accel, an early investor in the data labeling startup Scale AI, is in talks to lead a new round of funding …
A lawsuit against Marriott filed by an Air Force airman alleges he woke up in his hotel room to be sexually assaulted by another man who snuck into his room. As if that’s not disturbing enough, the suspect has a lengthy record of being a repeat offender.
]]>Would you swear a loyalty oath to humanity — or cheer on its extinction?
Stars that wink at you. Protons with 11 dimensions. Computers made of rows of human soldiers. Aliens that give virtual reality a whole new meaning.
All of these visual pyrotechnics are very cool. But none of them are at the core of what makes 3 Body Problem, the new Netflix hit based on Cixin Liu’s sci-fi novel of the same name, so compelling. The real beating heart of the show is a philosophical question: Would you swear a loyalty oath to humanity — or cheer on its extinction?
There’s more division over this question than you might think. The show, which is about a face-off between humans and aliens, captures two opposing intellectual trends that have been swirling around in the zeitgeist in recent years.
One goes like this: “Humans may be the only intelligent life in the universe — we are incredibly precious. We must protect our species from existential threats at all costs!”
The other goes like this: “Humans are destroying the planet — causing climate change, making species go extinct. The world will be better off if we go extinct!”
The first, pro-human perspective is more familiar. It’s natural to want your own species to survive. And there’s lots in the media these days about perceived existential threats, from climate change to rogue AI that one day could wipe out humanity.
But anti-humanism has been gaining steam, too, especially among a vocal minority of environmental activists who seem to welcome the end of destructive Homo sapiens. There’s even a Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which advocates for us to stop having kids so that humanity will fade out and nature will triumph.
And then there’s transhumanism, the Frankensteinish love child of pro-humanism and anti-humanism. This is the idea that we should use tech to evolve our species into Homo sapiens 2.0. Transhumanists — who span the gamut from Silicon Valley tech bros to academic philosophers — do want to keep some version of humanity going, but definitely not the current hardware. They imagine us with chips in our brains, or with AI telling us how to make moral decisions more objectively, or with digitally uploaded minds that live forever in the cloud.
Analyzing these trends in his book Revolt Against Humanity, the literary critic Adam Kirsch writes, “The anti-humanist future and the transhumanist future are opposites in most ways, except the most fundamental: They are worlds from which we have disappeared, and rightfully so.”
If you’ve watched 3 Body Problem, this is probably already ringing some bells for you. The Netflix hit actually tackles the question of human extinction with admirable nuance, so let’s get into the nuance a bit — with some mild spoilers ahead.
It would give too much away to say who in the show ends up repping anti-humanism. So suffice it to say that there’s an anti-humanist group in play — people who are actually trying to help the aliens invade Earth.
It’s not a monolithic group, though. One faction, led by a hardcore environmentalist named Mike Evans, believes that humans are too selfish to solve problems like biodiversity loss or climate change, so we basically deserve to be destroyed. Another, milder perspective says that humans are indeed selfish but may be redeemable — and the hope is that the aliens are wiser beings who will save us from ourselves. They refer to the extraterrestrials as literally “Our Lord.”
Meanwhile, one of the main characters, a brilliant physicist named Jin, is a walking embodiment of the pro-human position. When it becomes clear that aliens are planning to take over Earth, she develops a bold reconnaissance mission that involves sending her brainy friend, Will, into space to spy on the extraterrestrials.
Jin is willing to do whatever it takes to save humanity from the aliens, even though they’re traveling from a distant planet and their spaceships won’t reach Earth for another 400 years. She’s willing to sacrifice Will — who, by the way, is madly in love with her — for later generations of humans who don’t even exist yet.
Jin’s best friend is Auggie, a nanotechnology pioneer. When she’s asked to join the fight against the aliens, Auggie hesitates, because it would require killing hundreds of humans who are trying to help the aliens invade. Yet she eventually gives in to Jin’s appeals — and lots of people predictably wind up dead, thanks to a lethal weapon created from her nanotechnology.
As Auggie walks around surveying the carnage from the attack, she sees a child’s severed foot. It’s a classic “do the ends justify the means?” moment. For Auggie, the answer is no. She abandons the mission and starts using her nanotech to help people — not hypothetical people 400 years in the future, but disadvantaged people living in the here and now.
So, like Jin, Auggie is also a perfect emblem of the pro-human position — and yet she lives out that position in a totally different way. She is not content to sacrifice people today for the mere chance at helping people tomorrow.
But the most interesting character is Will, a humble science teacher who is given the chance to go into space and do humanity a major solid by gathering intel on the aliens. When the man in charge of the mission vets Will for the gig, he asks Will to sign a loyalty oath to humanity — to swear that he’ll never renege and side with the aliens.
Will refuses. “They might end up being better than us,” he says. “Why would I swear loyalty to us if they could end up being better?”
It’s a radical open-mindedness to the possibility that we humans might really suck — and that maybe we don’t deserve to be the protagonists of the universe’s story. If another species is better, kinder, more moral, should our allegiance be to furthering those values, or to the species we happen to be part of?
As we’ve seen, there are different ways to live out pro-humanism. In philosophy circles, there are names for these different approaches. While Auggie is a “neartermist,” focused on solving problems that affect people today, Jin is a classic “longtermist.”
At its core, longtermism is the idea that we should care more about positively influencing the long-term future of humanity — hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years from now. The idea emerged out of effective altruism (EA), a broader social movement dedicated to wielding reason and evidence to do the most good possible for the most people.
Longtermists often talk about existential risks. They care a lot about making sure, for example, that runaway AI doesn’t render Homo sapiens extinct. For the most part, Western society doesn’t assign much value to future generations, something we see in our struggles to deal with long-term threats like climate change. But because longtermists assign future people as much moral value as present people, and there are going to be way more people alive in the future than there are now, longtermists are especially focused on staving off risks that could erase the chance for those future people to exist.
The poster boy for longtermism, Oxford philosopher and founding EA figure Will MacAskill, published a book on the worldview called What We Owe the Future. To him, avoiding extinction is almost a sacrosanct duty. He writes:
With great rarity comes great responsibility. For thirteen billion years, the known universe was devoid of consciousness ... Now and in the coming centuries, we face threats that could kill us all. And if we mess this up, we mess it up forever. The universe’s self-understanding might be permanently lost ... the brief and slender flame of consciousness that flickered for a while would be extinguished forever.
There are a few eyebrow-raising anthropocentric ideas here. How confident are we that the universe was or would be barren of highly intelligent life without humanity? “Highly intelligent” by whose lights — humanity’s? And are we so sure that the universe would be meaningless without human minds to experience it?
But this way of thinking is popular among tech billionaires like Elon Musk, who talks about the need to colonize Mars as “life insurance” for the human species because we have “a duty to maintain the light of consciousness” rather than going extinct.
Musk describes MacAskill’s book as “a close match for my philosophy.”
A close match — but not a perfect match.
Musk has a lot of commonalities with the pro-human camp, including his view that we should make lots of babies in order to stave off civilizational collapse. But he’s arguably a bit closer to that strange combo of pro-humanism and anti-humanism that we know as “transhumanism.”
Hence Musk’s company Neuralink, which recently implanted a brain chip in its first human subject. The ultimate goal, in Musk’s own words, is “to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” He wants to develop a technology that helps humans “merg[e] with AI” so that we won’t be “left behind” as AI becomes more sophisticated.
In 3 Body Problem, the closest parallel for this approach is the anti-humanist faction that wants to help the aliens, not out of a belief that humans are so terrible they should be totally destroyed, but out of a hope that humans just might be redeemable with an infusion of the right knowledge or technology.
On the show, that technology comes via aliens; in our world, it’s perceived to be coming via AI. But regardless of the specifics, this is an approach that says: Let the overlords come. Don’t try to beat ’em — join ’em.
It should come as no surprise that the anti-humanists in 3 Body Problem refer to the aliens as “Our Lord.” That makes total sense, given that they’re viewing the aliens as a supremely powerful force that exists outside themselves and can propel them to a higher form of consciousness. If that’s not God, what is?
In fact, transhumanist thinking has a very long religious pedigree. In the early 1900s, French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin argued that we could use tech to nudge along human evolution and thereby bring about the kingdom of God; melding humans and machines would lead to “a state of super-consciousness” where we become a new enlightened species.
Teilhard influenced his pal Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist who popularized the term “transhumanism” (and the brother of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley). That influenced the futurist Ray Kurzweil, who in turn shaped the thinking of Musk and many Silicon Valley tech heavyweights.
Some people today have even formed explicitly religious movements around worshiping AI or using AI to move humanity toward godliness, from Martine Rothblatt’s Terasem movement to the Mormon Transhumanist Association to Anthony Levandowski’s short-lived Way of the Future church. “Our Lord,” indeed.
Hardcore anti-humanists go much farther than the transhumanists. In their view, there’s no reason to keep humanity alive.
The philosopher Eric Dietrich, for example, argues that we should build “the better robots of our nature” — machines that can outperform us morally — and then hand over the world to what he calls “Homo sapiens 2.0.” Here is his modest proposal:
Let’s build a race of robots that implement only what is beautiful about humanity, that do not feel any evolutionary tug to commit certain evils, and then let us — the humans — exit stage left, leaving behind a planet populated with robots that, while not perfect angels, will nevertheless be a vast improvement over us.
Another philosopher, David Benatar, argued in his 2006 book Better Never to Have Been, that the universe would not be any less meaningful or valuable if humanity were to vanish. “The concern that humans will not exist at some future time is either a symptom of human arrogance … or is some misplaced sentimentalism,” he wrote.
Whether or not you think we’re the only intelligent life in the universe is key here. If there are lots of civilizations out there, the stakes of humanity going extinct are much lower from a cosmic perspective.
In 3 Body Problem, the characters know for a fact that there’s other intelligent life out there. This makes it harder for the pro-humanists to justify their position: on what grounds, other than basic survival instinct, can they really argue that it’s important for humanity to continue existing?
Will might be the character with the most compelling response to this central question. When he refuses to sign the loyalty oath to humanity, he shows that he is neither dogmatically pro-humanist nor dogmatically anti-humanist. His loyalty is to certain values, like kindness.
In the absence of certainty about who enacts those values best — humans or aliens — he remains species-agnostic.
]]>‘It’s his nature.’
Sam Bankman-Fried has learned nothing, and I’m not sure any of the rest of us have, either.
At his sentencing, I sat several rows behind Bankman-Fried, clad in prison khaki and clanking faintly when he walked from the shackles on his feet, while he gave his statement to the court. “I’m sorry about what happened at every stage,” Bankman-Fried said. “I failed everyone I cared about.”
What Bankman-Fried did not say was that he had, in fact, committed crimes and he wouldn’t do it again. Instead, he talked about the “mistakes” he’d made, how he’d assisted the FTX customers in dealing with the bankruptcy estate, that he hadn’t actually engaged in witness tampering, and that, in fact, the FTX estate had “billions” more than necessary to repay the customers, and that has been true the whole time. He didn’t say a word about his lenders, two of which went bankrupt, or the investors, whose money is gone.
It struck me that Bankman-Fried was going with the strategy he’d outlined in a document, submitted as evidence by the prosecution. He was simply going to blame the bankruptcy lawyers, as outlined in points 4, 5, 6, and 9 in his little Google Doc.
He’s appealing the verdict, and so that meant he had to dance through saying he was sorry without really admitting to anything. But I was absolutely astonished when he began talking about how FTX employees had been robbed of their chance to build something wonderful and that they should get together to, essentially, create an FTX equivalent.
“I guess there is a big opportunity in the world to do what the world thought I would do, what it hoped I would do, at least for a while, what I hoped I would do for the world, not what I ended up doing,” Bankman-Fried said. “And 300 people that I used to work with, incredibly talented, selfless, impressive people were looking for something to do. If that happens, if they do what they could for the world, then hopefully I’ll be able to see their success, not just my own failures, each night.”
Imagine standing up at your sentencing and saying, “Yeah, I’d do it again, your honor.”
I have heard a lot, throughout this trial, about Bankman-Fried’s vaunted intelligence. I have been told, in documents filed by the defense, that he is simply misunderstood because he is autistic. That may be true, but I absolutely witnessed him perjure himself on the stand. So did Judge Lewis Kaplan, who, in commenting on the perjury, gave three examples: that Bankman-Fried lied about not knowing Alameda spent FTX customer funds, that he first learned of Alameda’s debt in October 2022, and that he did not know that asking Alameda to repay its lenders would necessitate further dipping into customer funds. I’m not an expert or anything, but I don’t think lying on the stand is a symptom of autism.
“I did not think it a fruitful use of time to spell out every time I thought Mr. Bankman-Fried testified, willfully and knowingly, falsely at trial,” Kaplan said. “And when he wasn’t outright lying, he was evasive, hairsplitting, dodging questions, and trying to get the prosecutor to reword questions in ways that he could answer in ways he thought less harmful than a truthful answer to the question that was posed would have been. I’ve been doing this job for close to 30 years. I’ve never seen a performance quite like that.”
The 25-year sentence (and $11 billion forfeiture) Kaplan gave had a lot to do with Bankman-Fried’s propensity for gambling. A math nerd who makes decisions in math, doing what we might call “cost / benefit analysis” and what Bankman-Fried called “expected value.” It was the math that did him in.
“In the head of this mathematical wizard, his own counsel tells us, in substance, that he was viewing the cost of getting caught, discounted by probability or improbability, against the gain of getting away without getting caught, given the probabilities,” Kaplan said. “That was the game. It started at least as early as Jane Street [the Wall Street firm Bankman-Fried joined straight out of college], and it continued to the very end. It’s his nature. And you don’t have to take my word for it — everybody has said that.”
Kaplan lingered on Caroline Ellison’s testimony about Bankman-Fried’s character; specifically, he told her that if there was a coin where tails destroyed the world and heads made the world twice as good, he’d gamble on flipping the coin. “A man willing to flip a coin as to the continued existence of life and civilization on Earth, if the chances were imperceptibly greater that it would come out without that catastrophic outcome, that’s really a leitmotif in my judgment of this entire case.”
Bankman-Fried rolled up to his sentencing and pitched a second FTX; he would absolutely keep flipping that coin.
He is flipping the coin right now, actually, hoping for a win on appeal.
One of the key skills in gambling is knowing when to cut your losses. It is, maybe, the skill — the only one that matters. It’s the lesson every first-time investor learns in their first bear market. It’s tempting to try to double-or-nothing your way out of a hole, but that rarely works out as planned. It didn’t work out at Alameda or FTX. It didn’t work out in Bankman-Fried’s trial. It didn’t work out in his sentencing. I suppose we will see about the appeal.
Bankman-Fried’s arrogance is of a Shakespearean scale. Arrogance can take a number of forms. One is not dressing up for an event where it is customary to wear a suit because you are so important you don’t need to follow the dress code. Another way is paying one of the biggest political bribes in history because you want to have your way. A third is determining that you, personally, must have the biggest charitable impact in the world.
Kaplan suggested that Bankman-Fried just likes the game. Maybe. It’s possible that Bankman-Fried simply cannot understand that he lost.
In order to understand that he’s lost and the jig is up, he would have to accept two things: that he isn’t as smart as he thought he was and that he’s not a good boy. I have sat through endless litanies of his good boy credentials; if we leave aside FTX’s matryoshka doll of crime, he’s better behaved than me. I have also been told many, many times that he’s smart. Private school. MIT. Jane Street. You get it.
That’s actually how he views himself. He’s smart and good. John J. Ray III, in his filing, hit the nail on the head when he said, “Mr. Bankman-Fried continues to live a life of delusion.”
In November 2022, FTX’s impending collapse triggered a 22 percent drop in the price of Bitcoin in a single day. Bitcoin’s now at about $70,000, higher than the peak of the last cycle. I have been told by a suspiciously large number of people that Bankman-Fried is a one-off, just a bad apple. Since I’ve started following crypto, this is the third bull run I’ve seen. I don’t know who the main character is going to be this time, but I know there’s going to be one.
The casino’s still open, 24 hours a day, for anyone who wants to take a seat at the table. The rules haven’t changed.
]]>Coal, oil, and natural gas producers have found their vision for a low-carbon world.
HOUSTON, Texas — In a video message projected onto massive screens in a packed conference hall, Sultan al-Jaber, the president of the COP28 climate conference held in the United Arab Emirates last year, graciously accepted a leadership award from one of the world’s biggest energy industry conventions.
Al-Jaber, who when not running UN climate summits is also the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, faced criticism from environmental groups for inviting major oil and gas companies to participate in the international climate negotiations. He also faced scrutiny for his comments that it’s not necessary to eliminate fossil fuels to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting warming this century to less than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) by the end of the century. But here in Houston, before a much friendlier crowd, he remained defiant.
“If the world is going to meet its climate goals, every stakeholder has to act,” al-Jaber said, with a model of a wind turbine on his desk. “Everyone had a seat at the table, everyone was invited to contribute, and everyone did contribute.”
CERAWeek by S&P Global — an annual conference of oil, gas, coal, renewable, and nuclear energy industries — returned the invitation, putting the once taboo topic of climate change in its headline.
“It is no exaggeration to say that [al-Jaber] helped the global community chart pathways to a sustainable future,” said Daniel Yergin, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning oil history The Prize and the founder of CERAWeek.
The conference isn’t meant to produce any formal agreements or treaties, but what attendees say on stage and behind closed doors often ripple through the global energy industry.
While only a sliver of the size of the last climate meeting — more than 8,000 delegates were at CERAWeek compared to more than 80,000 attendees at COP28 — the conference represents some of the most powerful companies in the world with trillions of dollars at their disposal to shape the future of global energy and the climate. The theme this year was “Multidimensional Energy Transition: Markets, climate, technology and geopolitics.”
The unwieldy title is an example of how the convention has grown in scope since it started in 1981 and how the industries it represents have begun to redefine their roles in a world constrained by rising average temperatures, yet still primarily dependent on fossil fuels. What was once a low-key meeting of oil and gas executives and analysts to talk frankly and cut deals has become a slick news-making tech conference where attendees are well fed and, after hours, well lubricated by sponsors. Think of it as Davos for the oil and gas set, hosted in the energy capital of the US.
“Twenty years ago you could not have a conversation here about climate change. Full stop,” Mark Brownstein, senior vice president for energy transition at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), who has attended the conference for decades, told Vox.
By now everyone at CERAWeek has gotten the memo on global warming and understood the assignment, at least in rhetoric. The world’s largest energy firms have come to a general consensus that the world is shifting toward clean energy — but that fossil fuels are still going to be necessary for the foreseeable future. “These truths are not in conflict,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. “The momentum of the clean energy transition is undeniable, even as we are the largest producer of oil and gas in the world.”
Every talk and panel discussion nodded to the energy transition, toward carbon management, efficiency, and clean tech. When it comes to energy sources — wind, solar, hydropower, natural gas, oil, hydrogen, coal, nuclear, geothermal, and even fusion — CERAWeek has truly embraced diversity, equity, and inclusion.
But even with greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere reaching levels not seen in eons and after the hottest year humans have ever measured, the fossil fuel industry whose products are driving climate change sees a bright future for itself. After all, despite the extraordinary expansion of clean energy generation, fossil fuels have only lost a small share of the global energy mix and are still expecting more growth.
The majors believe that technologies like carbon capture and storage will allow them to continue selling their wares as emissions regulations ratchet down, and that power-devouring technologies like artificial intelligence and growing markets in developing countries will continue to raise demand. By some estimates, data center electricity use is on track to more than double by 2026. Coal, oil, and natural gas consumption are at or near record highs in many parts of the world and their emissions are currently on track to grow through 2050, according to the Energy Information Administration. The world is hungry for BTUs and watts, and the energy industry is eager to serve them.
“I’m actually more optimistic today than I’ve ever been in this job,” ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told attendees, noting that COP28 was the first climate conference he has ever attended.
But that optimism hasn’t been matched with urgency on climate change, and the industry has a long history of slowing progress. While the language has changed more recently, the oil and gas industry has spent decades thwarting action on climate change, with lobbying, litigation, and misinformation. Exxon’s own scientists produced accurate internal forecasts of rising average temperatures as early as the 1970s while the company published full-page ads in newspapers casting doubt on warming into the late 1990s.
Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has also put energy security back on the front burner. For some countries, energy security today matters more than climate change tomorrow, leading them to prioritize secure sources, including fossil fuels in some cases. (Energy security wasn’t the only echo of the war — CERAWeek also helpfully reminded participants in its registration form not to attend if they are subject to sanctions.)
So while appetites for cleaner energy sources are growing, the stalwarts of the global energy industry have made it clear they aren’t letting go of the fuels that powered their rise. As these companies have grudgingly come to acknowledge climate change, many concerned about global warming have also begun to grapple with the likelihood that fossil fuels aren’t fading away anytime soon. And while most energy companies do envision reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, the current pace is nowhere near fast enough to bend the curve to meet climate goals. The future for the global energy industry is not just brighter, but hotter.
Across the skybridge from the hotel in the neighboring convention center, CERAWeek hosts what it calls Innovation Agora, where tech entrepreneurs and energy startups pitch their solutions to climate change in glass-walled booths under purple lights. It was once the kids’ table of the conference when it launched in 2017 but has since evolved into a parallel production, a clear reflection of clean energy’s massive growth and immense potential.
“Globally, clean energy investment has overtaken fossil fuel investment every year since 2016, according to the IEA,” Granholm said. “In the US, clean energy investment has tripled since 2018.”
The fossil fuel industry talks less about competition between conventional sources and renewables and more about collaboration between the “molecule” and the “electron” solution set, as Exxon’s Woods described it. The molecules are the hydrocarbons of coal, oil, and gas and increasingly, hydrogen, while the electrons are those generated by solar panels and wind turbines.
“I’m not suggesting one’s better than the other one,” Woods said. “What I’m suggesting is, we need both, and you need companies who have our scale, our capabilities.”
Unsurprisingly, the “molecule” companies have their eyes set on the technologies that play to their strengths. Hydrogen, a gas most commonly produced by reforming methane, fits well into the fossil fuel industry’s existing refining, pipeline, storage, and retail infrastructure. Geothermal, which harnesses heat from beneath the Earth’s surface, draws on the sector’s expertise in geology and drilling. Carbon capture — from smokestacks, from the ocean, from the air — gives fossil fuels a way to zero out their emissions, at least on paper, extending them a lifeline in a world where emissions must ratchet down. In the US, the Biden administration has set a target of cutting national greenhouse gas emissions in half compared to 2005 levels by 2030 and achieving net zero emissions by 2050.
US government incentives are sweetening the deal for cleaner energy technologies. The trio of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act have mobilized billions of dollars to research, build, and deploy low-emissions energy systems and the products that enable them. Unlike past legislative attempts to tackle climate change, these laws are almost all incentives, with no restrictions or caps on greenhouse gases baked in.
“I am very supportive of the IRA, because, as legislated, the IRA focuses on carbon intensity and in theory, [is] technology agnostic,” Woods said.
As for the villains, the energy industry as well as environmental groups found a common adversary in methane. It’s about 30 times more powerful than carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere. It’s the dominant component of natural gas, so producers do have an incentive to limit its leaks since it’s a salable product. At COP28, dozens of oil and gas firms committed to ending their methane pollution by 2050. Simply reducing methane output by 30 percent from 2020 levels by 2030 could avert 0.2°C of warming (0.36°F) by 2050. But methane is colorless and odorless, making it hard to detect where it’s escaping, and estimates of its emissions vary widely.
These concerns have fertilized the growth of the carbon accounting and verification business. Context Labs, one of the companies presenting at the Agora, has developed software so companies can track emissions across their facilities, sometimes down to individual pieces of hardware like generators or furnaces. The goal is to give companies actionable information about where they need to cut pollution, how they can route their operations to be more carbon efficient, and what assets will be at risk when emissions regulations get stricter.
Not everyone is ready to take these companies at their word, though. The Environmental Defense Fund launched a satellite to track global methane emissions just a few days before CERAWeek began and advertised it on the streets of Houston. EDF plans to publish its findings publicly to spur polluters to act.
There were still points of friction at the oil-soaked conference, as explained by Amin Nasser, president and CEO of Saudi Aramco. It’s not just the world’s largest oil company, with nearly four times the market capitalization of ExxonMobil; it’s the fourth-mightiest of all companies, shaping economies around the world. And as a mostly state-run enterprise under an autocratic regime, Saudi Aramco isn’t as swayed by activists or shareholders as a fully investor-owned company like Exxon.
Nasser laid out what he called five “hard realities” for the energy transition.
The first is that alternatives to hydrocarbons like wind and solar energy have received decades of research and development and billions of dollars in investment, but still hold single-digit market shares. Second, reducing the carbon intensity of fossil fuels — particularly through energy efficiency and switching from coal and oil to natural gas — has delivered greater greenhouse gas emissions reductions than the rise of clean energy. Third is that many alternative energy strategies like electric vehicles are unaffordable for a majority of people around the world. That ties into the fourth point, that most of global energy demand growth in the coming years will occur in developing countries. But despite representing 85 percent of the world’s population, these countries receive a tiny fraction of clean energy investment.
Nasser concluded with his fifth point: that the energy transition strategy of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy needs a reset. “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas and instead invest in them adequately, reflecting realistic demand assumptions,” Nasser said to widespread applause. “We should ramp up our effort to reduce carbon emissions, improve efficiency and introduce lower carbon solutions. And we should phase in new energy sources and technologies when they are genuinely ready, economically competitive, and with the right infrastructure.”
Many activists and other in the energy industry disagree with Nasser’s assessment. However, his comments echo the ongoing rifts at COP meetings between major fossil fuel-producing countries that became rich off oil and those often poorer countries facing the immediate effects of climate change like sea level rise, who want to see fossil fuel consumption zeroed out. It’s led to long, tortuous negotiations over language like “phase down” versus “phase out” and “unabated” emissions from fossil fuels.
But while many zero-carbon technologies are still expensive, so too are the systems required to keep burning coal, oil, and gas in a world where emissions must halt by the middle of the century to meet climate targets. Some of the cheapest carbon capture technologies to date still cost about $40 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, adding up to billions of dollars to capture any meaningful share of the 37.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted last year.
The US, now the world’s largest oil producer and natural gas exporter, is also in an awkward spot. While pledging to reduce its own emissions, the US is anticipating more fossil fuel exports and financing import facilities in other countries. That includes a doubling of liquefied natural gas shipments abroad by 2030, despite the White House’s pause on new export terminals. “The whole world needs to transition away from fossil fuels, but in the meantime, we still have to support our friends and allies in their energy needs,” John Podesta, the White House climate adviser who also leads climate diplomacy, told reporters.
Now in an election year, the Biden administration is trying to walk the line between taking credit for low gasoline prices and facilitating more fossil fuel extraction as it faces a challenger who wants to ramp up coal, oil, and natural gas, potentially adding another 4 billion metric tons by 2030 to the US’s already massive greenhouse gas emissions tally.
All the while, the era of low interest rates that drove the massive expansion of both renewables and natural gas in the US in the past decade is ending just as the country needs a massive new buildout of energy production and infrastructure. Financing expenses are getting higher while permitting time and costs remain an obstacle, slowing down the shift to cleaner energy. So while the threats from climate change are more apparent than ever, it’s getting harder to wield the tools to keep it in check, and that means the fuels of the industrial revolution will continue to light the road ahead, for a while at least.
]]>Russia’s year-long detention of Evan Gershkovich is one part of a very grim picture for journalism.
This morning, Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter and the first American journalist to be arrested in Russia on espionage charges since the Cold War, woke up to his second year in prison.
After five years of covering Russia, he was arrested in March 2023. It came as a shock: Though Russian journalists have long faced increasing repression and even deadly peril, international journalists “were generally a somewhat protected class,” as my former colleague Jonathan Guyer wrote one year ago.
One thing Gershkovich had in common with many Russian journalists who have run afoul of the state: His arrest was bogus. Within two weeks, the US government officially designated him as “wrongfully detained.” Reporters Without Borders (RSF), meanwhile, considers him a “Russian state hostage.” Despite a year of pre-trial hearings and extensions on his detention, Russia has publicly provided no clear evidence to substantiate its allegations.
For the media that remains in the country, it has also “had a huge chilling effect, with further self-censorship,” Jeanne Cavelier, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk, said over email.
That all serves Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aims amid the ongoing war in Ukraine. But what’s happened to Gershkovich isn’t just about Putin.
Yes, his government was already particularly bad on press freedom and has only gotten worse since Russia invaded Ukraine: Over 30 journalists in Russia are currently imprisoned because of their reporting, and “between 1,500 to 1,800 Russian journalists were forced into exile” over the last two years, according to a report by the RSF’s JX Fund.
“Russia is ranked 164th out of 180 countries in the last Press Freedom Index,” Cavelier pointed out. “It dropped another nine places last year, in the worst category of the ranking where the press freedom situation is classified as ‘very serious.’”
But it would be short-sighted to think that brazen attacks on the media stop at Russia’s borders.
The most egregious example of what happens when there’s a sense of impunity over attacks on journalists is the Israel-Hamas war.
As the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) noted in December, 68 journalists were killed in the first 10 weeks of the war — more “than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.”
That tally has only grown since.
Gaza was already a difficult place to conduct independent journalism, given Hamas’s harassment, intimidation, and physical abuse of reporters. And war zones are obviously dangerous for all civilians, reporters included.
But Israel has said it cannot guarantee journalists’ safety in Gaza and has denied international reporters access to the territory. Even more concerning: Critics say the Israel Defense Forces also appear to have a pattern of targeting journalists.
“In at least one case, a journalist was killed while clearly wearing press insignia in a location where no fighting was taking place,” CPJ reported. “In at least two other cases, journalists reported receiving threats from Israeli officials and IDF officers before their family members were killed.”
This builds on years of broader restrictions and harassment of the media, including 20 killings of journalists by Israeli fire over the last two decades. Israel has opened investigations into many of these deaths, to be sure, but no one has ultimately been held accountable.
One notable example: In 2022, Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed as she was reporting for Al Jazeera on an IDF raid in the West Bank. Independent media investigations indicated it was a deliberate attack by IDF soldiers.
Israel says there is a “high possibility” a soldier shot Abu Akleh but there was “no suspicion that a bullet was fired deliberately.” (The US response to the killing of one of its citizens was slow to materialize; only six months after her death did reports break that the US had opened an investigation into her killing.)
Yes, wars are dangerous to report from. With one exception, “the countries with the highest number of journalists killed for their work in any given year” — Syria in 2012, Afghanistan in 2018, Ukraine in 2022, and Somalia in 2012 — were at war or amid an insurrection, per CPJ data.
But this isn’t exclusive to war zones.
Anywhere there’s a struggle for power or even just a lot of money at stake, the media is at risk — be that from the state, non-state actors (like cartels, terrorist groups, or business interests), or an unholy union of the two.
Nowhere is that clearer than in Latin America and the Caribbean.
At the risk of making your eyes glaze over, I’ll stop there.
This profession has never been safe. But until a decade ago or so, there was at least a sense that journalists had a recognized role in reporting from even the world’s worst conflicts — and that role afforded them some protection.
The last couple of years have felt particularly grim, and the outbreak of two wars by two governments, both known to operate with impunity toward reporters, is an obvious turn for the worse.
This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.
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