Lifeboat Foundation

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — An entire county school system in coal-producing West Virginia is going solar, representing what a developer and U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin’s office touted on Wednesday as the biggest-ever single demonstration of sun-powered renewable electricity in Appalachian public schools.

The agreement between Wayne County Schools and West Virginian solar installer and developer Solar Holler builds on historic investments in coal communities made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act, which Democratic Sen. Manchin had a major role in shaping as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Manchin, who announced this month that he wouldn’t run for reelection in the deep-red state, citing an increasingly polarized political system, was quick Wednesday to tout U.S. President Joe Biden’s 2022 landmark climate, health and tax law, which placed special emphasis on creating new clean energy jobs.

Since the explosive launch of ChatGPT, there has been a prevailing fear among workers that they will be unable to compete against artificial intelligence, leading to mass unemployment.

In fact, the European Central Bank’s research predicted that AI will actually create jobs and that any reports suggesting otherwise “may be greatly exaggerated”

After assessing nine years of data gathered across 16 European countries, the ECB found that low and medium-skill jobs were largely unaffected by booming technology, meanwhile, opportunities for younger and high-skilled workers actually increased rather than vanished.

Continue reading “AI won’t steal your job—but it might cut your paycheck, Europe’s central bank says” »

As the dust still settles on OpenAI’s latest drama, a letter has surfaced from several staff researchers citing concerns about an AI superintelligence model under development that could potentially pose a threat to humanity, according to those close to the source. The previously undisclosed letter is understood to be the real reason behind why Sam Altman was fired from the company.

The model, known internally as Project Q*, could represent a major breakthrough in the company’s pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a highly autonomous branch of AI superintelligence capable of cumulative learning and outperforming humans in most tasks. And you were worried about ChatGPT taking all our jobs?

With Sam Altman now firmly back at the company and a new OpenAI board in place, here are all of the details of Project Q*, as well as the potential implications of AGI in the bigger picture.

AI can be used to make our lives easier, but it is also a frightening tool that could see many of us out of a job – at least according to some experts.

Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) CEO Kylie Walker told The Canberra Times AI could replace anywhere between 25 and 46 percent of all Aussie jobs by 2030.

Walker, and a group of 13 other AI experts, called for a $1 billion national artificial intelligence initiative in a new report to push out more than 100,000 digitally skilled workers over the next decade.

Late on Tuesday night, OpenAI announced the return of Sam Altman, its ousted chief executive officer, along with a revamped board that included one name not often associated with Silicon Valley: Larry Summers.

The economist and former Treasury Secretary joined Bret Taylor, a former co-CEO of Salesforce Inc., and existing board member Adam D’Angelo in forming what the company called an “initial board.” OpenAI’s prior directors fired Altman suddenly on Friday, setting off a dramatic saga that cast doubt on the future of the most closely-watched startup and technology.

OpenAI said it was still working to “figure out the details” of its new management in a post online. But with Summers it has a board member with deep ties to Wall Street and Washington — and an adamant belief that artificial intelligence is coming for white-collar jobs.

Americans are falling out of love with jobs requiring bachelor’s degrees and turning their attention toward flexible, college-free careers with six-figure salaries.

On Google, searches for “no degree jobs” reached an all-time high this year in the U.S., according to Google Trends data shared with CNBC Make It.

Close to 75% of jobs in the U.S. that pay more than $35,000 a year require a college degree, but just 38% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree, says Lisa Gevelber, Google’s chief marketing officer for the Americas.

Ford said Tuesday it is cutting production capacity by roughly 43% to 20 gigawatt hours per year and reducing expected employment from 2,500 jobs to 1,700 jobs. The company declined to disclose how much less it would invest in the plant. Based on the reduced capacity, it would still be about a $2 billion investment.

The decision adds to a recent retreat from EVs by automakers globally. Demand for the vehicles is lower than expected due to higher costs and challenges with supply chains and battery technologies, among other issues.

Reductions at the Marshall, Michigan, plant are part of Ford’s plans announced last month to cut or delay about $12 billion in previously announced EV investments. The company will also postpone construction of another electric vehicle battery plant in Kentucky.

For a magnet to stick to a fridge door, several physical effects inside of it need to work together perfectly. The magnetic moments of its electrons all point in the same direction, even if no external magnetic field forces them to do so.

This happens because of the so-called exchange interaction, a combination of electrostatic repulsion between electrons and quantum mechanical effects of the electron spins, which, in turn, are responsible for the magnetic moments. This is a common explanation for the fact that certain materials like iron or nickel are ferromagnetic or permanently magnetic, as long as one does not heat them above a particular temperature.

At ETH in Zurich, a team of researchers led by Ataç Imamoğlu at the Institute for Quantum Electronics and Eugene Demler at the Institute for Theoretical Physics have now detected a new type of ferromagnetism in an artificially produced material, in which the alignment of the magnetic moments comes about in a completely different way. They recently published their results in the journal Nature.

The United Arab Emirates has launched the Al Dhafra solar farm – now the world’s largest single-site solar farm – ahead of COP28.

The 2-gigawatt (GW) solar farm is 22 miles (35 km) from Abu Dhabi and features almost 4 million bifacial solar panels. It will power nearly 200,000 homes and eliminate over 2.4 million tonnes of carbon emissions annually.

It created 4,500 jobs during the peak of the construction phase, and the solar panels were installed at an average rate of 10 megawatts (MW) a day during construction.