Judith Curry

SpaceX did something on November 4 that most companies building AI infrastructure never bother to do. It sent its own people into an elementary school auditorium in Cochise, Arizona, put the numbers on the table and took questions from a packed room. Riley Trettel, who leads energy and supercomputer development at SpaceX, said it plainly: "SpaceX is the owner, and with approval, will be the builder and the owner of the project long term." Then he laid out what the county gets. Up to 40% off residential power bills for Sulphur Springs co-op members for the life of the project. $3.6 billion in new power lines paid by SpaceX and handed to the co-op, which takes on no debt. $30 to $100 million a year in new property tax, with a 20% cut in everyone else's county property taxes. Enough one-time sales tax to pay off the county jail bond. Dry cooling, so the whole campus uses about as much water as 20 to 30 homes. No gas turbines on site. Up to $50 billion invested and about 1,000 permanent jobs. On the latest All-In, one of the hosts brought up the video of that night. "These two very bright, earnest people from SpaceX trying to explain how they're going to reduce electricity cost by 40%. They don't use water. They'll reduce property taxes by 20%." About Riley and Katie: "Good SpaceX employees. They should be proud of how they conducted themselves." They were shouted over from the first slide. Months of headlines about data centers draining aquifers and spiking bills did that work before anyone walked in. Some residents stayed after the presentation to tell SpaceX they want it there. The county's planning and zoning hearing is December 9.

We need to stop using generic terminology. AI is not a monolith. There are critical things we need to do with AI for economic prosperity, there are things we may have to do for reasons of national competition, there are things we will at some point need to do carefully for the sake of charting and taming the computational universe, and there are things we should totally avoid doing at this stage of history, and maybe ever, if at all possible. If we can’t be precise about these issues because we’re saying vague things like “using coding agents to make AI progress should be illegal”, then we risk failing altogether. Each of the goals above depends on achieving the others. If we can’t prosper we can’t lead the world into the future. Everyone needs to internalize this. Democrats cannot subjugate themselves to antigrowth. Republicans cannot subjugate themselves to technocapital. Both roads lead to despair.

If you’re looking for a worthwhile way to spend your weekend, read Evald Ilyenkov’s fiery masterpiece, Our Schools Must Teach How to Think! He demolishes the fantasy that overloading a child’s brain with facts about different subjects teaches them how to think. As Heraclitus++

My latest Substack essay, 'The Intellectual Dogma of Our Times'. A discussion of the philosophical dogma that unites leading thinkers in fields such as computer science, economics, history, and political science. Link below.

People who have been in research fields develop a felt sense that most "research" (in almost any field that isn't exactingly technical) is research theater, and many superstar careers enjoy star status not because of a unique connection to the truth but because of a unique connection with an audience. No one really has the time or stature to, from a position of objectivity and trust, bring popular researchers to heel. But it will get increasingly hard to hide from serious critique. The machines can do critique now, at the level of depth and rigor previously only possible for the academically deranged. We're going to have to revise a lot of what we "know" about the world that isn't really knowledge but is actually just received popular consensus - like floating voltages without grounding wires. The grounding wires are coming.

In climate science, questioning or critiquing a climate science finding is now treated as personal attacks on the researcher. Why is that?

📚🚨 The book UNELECTED is finally out - order it today if you haven't! 🇺🇸 There'll be more Democracy Files drops today - but as it happens, today is launch day for my book UNELECTED. It is a coincidence that I stumbled into an archive of these ex-USAID officials less than a week before the book's release. The UNELECTED is about how and why a massive global network of NGOs came to dominate our everyday American policies. And crucially, UNELECTED ends in a whitepill that shows us the way out of this mess. UNELECTED is a joint collaboration between @JoshuaLisec and myself. I started this effort because my own doxxing happened during the Tesla Takedown protests, while I was in the process of being recruited by DOGE. DOGE employees were having their life made miserable, and I had to take my own children and flee out of state. While researching who organized and financed the protests, I noticed all the backers were all about democracy. Democratic resilence, strengthening democracy, protecting democracy. I was like ... "wait, why are democracy groups behind this?" DOGE was cutting silly DEI foreign aid awards, it wasn't overturning any elections. What I came to find was shocking - these silly USAID awards added up to a global regime change machine. "Democracy" has nothing to do with elections. "Democracy," to them, means diffused governance outside of the three branches of our Constitutional Republic via private citizens in the form of NGOs. The network started assembling over a hundred years ago with the founding of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and has snowballed into a machinery worth trillions of dollars that has sucked taxpayer money, philanthropic money, union dues. That became UNELECTED. You've been reading about the coup the past couple of days. UNELECTED shows how and why the coup came to be. I'm so lucky to have met wonderful people throughout this journey - @petermarocco, "Big Balls" @as400495 , and countless others who sacrificed so much more to right our country. Vote straight Republican on November 3rd, and buy UNELECTED.

Judith Curry is one of the most important heroes of intellectual integrity of the past 20 years. I began following her when she was celebrated by the mainstream establishment while commenting on technical climate blogs. She was invariably fair minded and balanced in her replies and consideration of evidence. Her own blog, started later, has some of the most thoughtful commentary on the challenges of climate science and climate policy. Her book is the single best overview of the challenges inherent in both.