Impact Boosters - Michigan 2024 CGO

Impact Boosters
Thank you to Jack Finkle, Jordan Gordon, Cathryn Wu, and Ekaksh Bansal for this file. Of course, thank you to our Lab Leader Nate “The Great” Glancy.
THEE IMPACTS
5G
Warming
U.S 5G tech dominance is key to the sustainable transition.
Petrie and Curtis 22 [Jilane Rodgers and Melissa; 01-22-24; Jilane Rodgers Curtis is the Assistant Vice President of Public Affairs at CTIA, Melissa Curtis is a Client Relationship Marketer in Communications, Media & Technology at Accenture; Accenture; “5G-Enabled Technologies Could Solve for One-Fifth of U.S. Climate Change Target by 2025, New Study Finds”; https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2022/5g-enabled-technologies-could-solve-for-one-fifth-of-us-climate-change-target-by-2025-new-study-finds] cathryn
New use cases stemming from 5G networks will reduce U.S. carbon footprint by up to 330.8 MMtCO2e — the equivalent of removing 72 million passenger vehicles from the road, report projects
WASHINGTON, D.C.; Jan. 26, 2022 – 5G connectivity will play a significant role in enabling the U.S. to meet the Biden Administration’s climate change goals, with 5G-enabled use cases projected to make up to a 20% contribution toward the country’s carbon emission reduction targets by 2025, according to a new Accenture (NYSE: ACN) study commissioned by CTIA, the wireless industry association.
--- “This study confirms that U.S. 5G wireless networks will be instrumental in tackling the pressing challenge of climate change,” said Meredith Attwell Baker, CTIA President and CEO. “America’s wireless industry is building a world-leading 5G platform that will spur the investment and innovation necessary to meet our country’s climate objectives.”
The report, titled 5G Connectivity: A Key Enabling Technology to Meet America’s Climate Change Goals, finds that use cases on 5G networks will enable up to 330.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMtCO2e) of additional abatement by 2025. That is the equivalent of removing 26% of all the passenger vehicles from the road in the U.S. for a year — roughly 72 million vehicles.
The report examined 31 use cases for 5G across five industry verticals: transportation and cities, manufacturing, buildings and energy, agriculture, and working, living and health. The report discusses the following three verticals in depth, where 5G will have significant downstream carbon abatement potential:
Transportation and cities: 5G-enabled use cases in the ground transportation and cities vertical can total up to 86.5 MMtCO2e of carbon abatement in the U.S., thanks to reduced traffic congestion, reduced vehicle idling at signals and while parking, shorter routes optimization, and greater adoption and opt-ins of more sustainable choices such as public transportation. The carbon abatement in this vertical is equivalent to the carbon sequestered by 106 million acres of U.S forests in a year.
Manufacturing: 5G-enabled use cases in the manufacturing vertical can total up to 67.4 MMtCO2e of carbon abatement in the U.S., thanks to enhanced inventory management, real-time asset monitoring, predictive maintenance, process augmentation, and travel avoidance. The carbon abatement from inventory management by 2025 alone is equivalent to removing CO2 emissions from 17 coal fired power-plants in a year.
Energy and buildings: 5G-enabled use cases in the energy and buildings vertical can total up to 67.9 MMtCO2e of carbon abatement in the U.S., thanks to real-time monitoring, increased green energy use, fuel savings through reduced transport facilitated by remote operations, building energy management systems, commercial HVAC controls, smart meters and smart grids, and renewable microgrids. The carbon abatement from energy and buildings by 2025 is equivalent to removing CO2 emissions from electricity consumed by 12 million homes in a year.
“This study shows 5G networks can bring material reductions in our country’s carbon footprint,” said Peters Suh, Accenture’s North America Communications and Media industry lead. “The crucial piece will be how industries leverage cloud-first 5G networks to bring greater innovation into key operational processes. With appropriate education and ecosystem changes, organizations can reap the climate benefits of 5G across their cloud continuum, which includes everything from the public cloud to the edge."
“U.S. 5G networks already cover 305 million people, we’re building out 5G faster than we built out 4G, and every day, the wireless industry is working to make these networks go faster and farther,” added Attwell Baker. “Taken together, America’s wireless ecosystem is positioning U.S. innovators across these key industry verticals to quickly unlock these climate benefits.”
AI
Misalignment Inevitable
AI misalignment is inevitable. Even so, aligned AI is existential.
Levin 24 [Peter L; 01-24-24; Peter L. Levin is adjunct senior fellow in the Technology and National Security program at the Center for a New American Security, and CEO of Amida Technology Solutions Inc; The Hill; “The real issue with artificial intelligence: The misalignment problem”; https://thehill.com/opinion/4427702-the-real-issue-with-artificial-intelligence-the-misalignment-problem/] cathryn
Our obsession with AI diverts attention and energy away from more imminent and transcendent threats to our society and global human progress. The dangerous misalignment is not of moral values between people and computers, but between people and their ideological opponents. Irrefutable facts and valid (if mistaken) opinions have been replaced by deliberately false ideas injected into our discourse like a potent and addictive narcotic of delusion. If we cannot agree on objective and repeatable scientific insights, or a true historical record, how will we collaborate in the best long-term interests of the country or our planet? Today there is nothing that filters the shibboleths from the facts that are fed to AI computers.
The real hazard is not machine-derived calamity. It is bad human decisions that are accelerated and amplified by AI. There are plenty of things we think we know, from calculating financial risk to determining criminal recidivism, that in the immortal words of Mark Twain, “just ain’t so.” Training computers based on discriminatory precedent is irresponsible at best and prejudicial at worst. Repairing flawed ideology in human memory or computer storage is wickedly difficult, and it takes time to focus ethical lenses in both media.
In the real world, and for all of pre-broadcast history, new information or edicts, provable or not, sustainable or not, diffused very slowly. The worst ideas, designed to oppress, exclude, incite, and subjugate, were eventually extirpated, sometimes painfully, from the social system. Good ideas — including the demolition of the bad ones — take even longer, but eventually succeed. As Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Golda Meir, and Nelson Mandela reassure us: The defeat of harmful structures is always just a question of time. The ultimate strategic intelligence is that authentic liberty is renewable but not self-executing. It needs debate and nourishes criticism; AI is capable of neither.
Another deficit, and a source of contamination, is the weaponized misinformation inserted by foreign interests into our popular press and social media. Those pathogens are ingested into the training sets that teach generative platforms how to speak and what to say. AI has neither ambition nor judgement. It is just advanced — and impressive — pattern recognition. Unless we are much more careful and deliberate, it will be years before we expunge toxic spew from the training sets and align them to our expectations and laws.
Finally, the global market and (until recently) our national security depend on sophisticated components that come from China. We taught them ourselves. Policymakers from both parties expected the Middle Kingdom to become a large market and friendly competitor. Instead they are a fierce commercial rival and America’s most worrisome military antagonist. They already train almost 10 times the number of engineering students we do and will soon produce twice as many engineering Ph.D.s. The AI misalignment here is that they have more of it than we do.
The clear and present danger is not artificial intelligence. It is the integrity of its training.
Like a real brain, AI only “learns” what we teach it. Today’s computer models are vulnerable to absorbing wrong ideas and disproven theories about science, history, economics and philosophy. This is no different than schools that promote creationism, holocaust denial, mercantilism, and oppression theories cloaked as real science. Dumb ideas are being embedded into massive computer memories (now about as big as a human brain) that indiscriminately produce conclusions that sound real but cannot be independently validated, traced, checked or challenged. The real-world implications are identical: spiritual superstition, entrenched suspicion, and fabricated conflict.
Economic Collapse
Gen AI leads to global economic collapse.
Brown 24 [Courtenay; 06-05-24; Courtenay Brown is an economics reporter at Axios. She covers the global economy, central banks, financial markets and macroeconomic trends; Axios; “How AI could roil the next economic crisis”; https://www.axios.com/2024/06/05/generative-ai-economics-impact] cathryn
The next recession may happen amid a new technological landscape: wide adoption of generative AI, a phenomenon untested by an economic shock.
Why it matters: The potential economic upsides of AI, including how it might fuel productivity growth, are fairly clear. More uncertain are the potential hits to labor and financial markets when the boom time ends.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is expected to echo the risks of AI-powered financial systems in a speech this week, highlighting the "black box" nature of models that are a mystery even to their designers.
What they're saying: "[T]he widespread use of AI could turn an ordinary downturn into a deep and prolonged economic crisis by causing large-scale disruptions in labor markets, in financial markets, and in supply chains," Gita Gopinath, the IMF's No. 2 official, said in a recent speech.
State of play: Gopinath says the globe's experience with automation and labor markets in recent decades offers something of a warning.
When the economy is solid, businesses are more willing to invest in new technologies and hold onto workers. When the economy slips, companies shed workers to cut costs and might never return to previous employment levels.
"In the next downturn, AI is likely to threaten a wider range of jobs than in past cycles, including higher-skilled cognitive jobs," Gopinath said, stressing she was outlining a risk, not making a prediction.
"The result could be unprecedented job losses," with long-term displaced workers who don't have skills fit for an AI-centric economy.
The intrigue: Financial firms that use trading strategies powered by AI might "struggle to respond" to such unprecedented economic conditions, Gopinath said.
"[T]hey might quickly and simultaneously become overly conservative and rebalance portfolios toward safe assets," Gopinath said.
As the prices of assets ditched by the models plunge, it could ripple into a "self-confirming spiral of fire-sales and collapsing asset prices across different financial markets."
Relatedly, supply chain models built on AI could stoke forecasting mistakes that cause huge swings in inventories and production. "This could cause crippling delays and shortages of critical supplies across the global economy," Gopinath says.
The bottom line: "Most international efforts to mitigate AI risk are currently directed toward concerns around security, privacy, ethics, and disinformation," Gopinath said.
"But we also need a serious international effort to AI-proof the economy."
Democracy
AI dooms democracy.
Bell and Korinek 24 [Stephenie A. and Anton; 03-14-24; Stephenie A. Bell is the Chief Programs and Insights Officer - Partnership on AI, Anton Korinek is a Nonresident Fellow - Economic Studies, Center on Regulation and Markets; Brookings; “AI’s economic peril to democracy”; https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ais-economic-peril-to-democracy/] cathryn
Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to fundamentally reshape labor markets and the economy. If the gains accrue narrowly while human labor loses value, economic inequality could substantially worsen. In our recent article on “AI’s Economic Peril” for the Journal of Democracy, we argue that this poses a grave threat to democracy that is separate from more traditional AI risks to democracy such as deep fakes and misinformation: High inequality corrodes democratic institutions through increased elite influence, corruption, populism, and greater public discontent. At the same time, weakened democracy loses power to reign in inequality through progressive policies.
This may create a vicious feedback loop of eroding democracy and rising inequality, which may accelerate rapidly following an economic shock like large-scale displacement of workers by AI. The result could be a new society-wide equilibrium with starkly increased income disparities and a weakened voice for ordinary citizens.
To avert this vicious cycle, policy interventions should pursue two complementary goals: 1) Mitigate inequality arising from AI’s economic impacts, and 2) Strengthen democracy against the corrosive effects of increased inequality.
Several policies show promise for reducing the risk that AI may increase inequality:
Guide AI development to create new opportunities for humans and augment their abilities, rather than solely automating work. Governments can encourage this through R&D funding rules, while companies can make human-centric AI part of their technology strategy.
Empower workers through promoting unionization, collective bargaining, co-determination of technology, and other means of giving labor voice and leverage. This is especially important in white-collar fields likely to be disrupted.
Reform tax policies so that hiring humans is not disadvantaged compared to acquiring AI systems and automation. This removes incentives to replace workers.
Use antitrust enforcement and regulation to prevent excessive concentration of power and gains from AI development. Authorities should be vigilant about monopolization.
To directly strengthen democracy, inclusive political reforms are needed, including:
Improving electoral integrity through transparency, security, access, and representation. This bolsters citizens’ political voice.
Reducing the outsized influence of wealthy interests on the policy process through reforms. This could include public campaign financing and closing “revolving doors” between government and industry.
Building more participatory institutions that empower ordinary citizens, such as participatory budgeting whereby citizens have the opportunity to allocate parts of the public budget through a deliberative process. This gives people more direct say over policies.
Designing AI systems themselves to depolarize public discourse rather than contribute to tribalism. This can facilitate broad-based policymaking.
If AI advances eventually create technological unemployment, more sweeping reforms may become necessary. Policymakers should avoid short-sighted work requirements as a precondition for receiving social services. Instead, if labor markets are undermined, alternative mechanisms for distributing income equitably may be needed. With thoughtful policies, however, a future of shared prosperity alongside AI advances remains achievable. Although challenging, the path to prevent inequality from weakening democracy still lies open before us.
Climate Change
Indo-Pak War
Warming collapses the Indian economy and spills over to India-Pakistan war
Mohan 14; Vishwa Climate change 4-1-2014 may lead India to war: UN report
NEW DELHI: Asia is facing the brunt of climate change and will see severe stress on water resources and food-grain production in the future, increasing the risk of armed conflict among India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and China, the latest report of a UN panel has warned. UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its report assessing impacts of climate change on human health, settlements and natural resources released on Monday, carried a dire warning. "The worst is yet to come," it said, if no measures are taken to curb the ill-effects of global warming. India, like other developing economies, may lose up to 1.7% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) if the annual mean temperature rises by 1 degree Celsius compared to pre-industrialization level, hitting the poor the most. The report also predicts an increase in extreme weather events such as last year's flash floods in Uttarakhand and cyclone Phailin in Odisha if steps are not taken to control the rise in temperature. "Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change," R K Pachauri, IPCC chairman said while making the report public in Yokohama, Japan.
Terror
Climate change mobilizes global terror groups
Einem 24, Johhny von Einem is the Media Coordinator at the University of Adelaide and former editor of CityMag, 4/4/24, “Climate change impacts terrorist activity” Science Daily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/04/240403224905.htm
Changing weather patterns induced by climate change are contributing to shifts in the location of terrorist activity, according to new research.
An exploratory study led by extremism expert Dr Jared Dmello, from the University of Adelaide's School of Social Sciences, found some climatological variables affected terrorist activity in India.
"Suitability analyses indicate that all the climatological variables tested -- temperature, precipitation, and elevation -- relate to shifting patterns of terrorist activity," says Dr Dmello.
"Urban centres have increasingly grown in population density, particularly in spaces with favourable climates, and some of the more remote areas once used by extremists have experienced such increasingly dynamic climates that they are no longer fit for human habitation, forcing these groups to migrate elsewhere."
It was not only the intensity of these climatological variables that led to terrorists moving to new locales, this shifting of terrorist activity was also seasonal.
"This research shows that stopping the damaging effects of climate change is not just an environmental issue but one that is directly tied to national security and defence," says Dr Dmello, who was recently announced as the inaugural recipient of the Early Career Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences' Security and Crime Prevention Section.
"In this study, we focus on attack location, but the data also suggests other forms of extremist behaviour, such as training location, are likely shifting in response to climate change as well."
The study, published in the Journal of Applied Security Research, concentrated on terrorist activity in India between 1998-2017, a period during which there were 9096 terrorist incidents recorded by the Global Terrorism Database.
"Average temperatures in India reached record highs during our 20-year study period," said Dr Dmello.
"This time frame represents a broad enough range to demonstrate climate change, while also availing of the most recent reliable data that covers both the climate change and extremism dimensions for the country."
This new and evolving understanding of how climate change affects patterns of terrorism is important knowledge for governments across the world, including Australia's, to inform national security and defence strategies.
"While terrorism and violent extremism manifests differently in Australia, with far lower levels of attacks than India, radicalisation is still a salient challenge here and one that the Australian Government has established as a national priority," says Dr 

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