If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
What Are Data Centers Doing? A Mind-Boggling Amount of Math.: The calculations needed to train A.I. are nearly impossible to visualize — but we tried anyway. (Aatish Bhatia Oct. 15, 2026, NY Times)
| An iPhone | 13 million years |
| A PlayStation 5 | 3 million years |
| A high-end gaming PC | 300,000 years |
| An Nvidia H100 chip | 64,000 years |
| 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips | 8 months |
Amazon has over 1 million robot workers. What’s next for human employees? (Jeremy Hsu, Oct 12, 2026, Ars Technica)
In many ways, robotics and AI are well suited to the relentless pace of work that is already happening inside e-commerce fulfillment centers. Amazon’s promise of speedy deliveries for its 200 million Prime subscribers in particular requires hundreds of thousands of human employees to speedily assemble and ship out customer orders that often combine a dizzying array of products.
Much of the work in fulfillment centers also frequently involves “dull, dirty and dangerous” tasks that people may prefer to hand over to robots. The injury and illness rate for workers in the US warehouse sector has typically been more than double the average across all industries, according to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
“You have almost 2 million people working in the warehousing sector in the United States, and it’s characterized by very high turnover and very high workplace injury rates,” said Greenwood.
The solar boom is rapidly transforming emerging economies: Renewable electricity is cheaper than ever. So while the West got rich on coal and oil, some of the poorest countries in the world are banking on solar, wind and water instead. (Kira Schacht, 10/07/26, Deutsche-Welle)
Many of the same countries that became economically powerful off the back of fossil fuels are now trying to transition to renewables. But they are held back by centuries of legacy infrastructure.
Because a gas boiler won’t run on wind power, and a diesel truck cannot be solar-powered, societies looking to shift to green energy need to use more electricity and increase their share of renewables.
That is where many middle- and lower-income countries have an advantage. With less existing energy infrastructure built around fossil fuels, they are better placed for a faster rollout of renewable electricity sources.
In many instances, solar power in particular is now cheaper to produce than fossil electricity. And unlike large coal or gas plants, which take years to construct and millions in investments, solar and wind farms can be built quickly and with much less upfront cost.
How everything-to-grid tech could turn your EV and home into part of giant power grid network (Kaif Shaikh, Oct 04, 2026, Interesting Engineering)
As solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and connected devices spread, millions of things that consume electricity can also store it, shift when they use it or, in some cases, send it back. “Everything-to-grid” is the emerging idea of coordinating those resources so they become active parts of the power system rather than simply sitting at the end of the network. The World Economic Forum included the concept among its Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026.
Can there be solar for all, everywhere by 2030? (Sarah Steffen, 10/02/26, Deutsche-Welle)
Solar is the cheapest form of electricity in the history of the world, said McKenna, who founded the climate advisory firm Climate and Nature Solutions, and the global coalition Women Leading on Climate.
“It is scaling way faster than anyone ever imagined.”
As is battery technology used to store excess renewable energy.
2030 seemed ample when the goal was 2050.
The Mirror and the Gap (Garrett W. Ennis, September 29, 2026, Palladium)
Many of us talk to these digital systems daily: we confide in them, seeking advice, support, approval; even purely technical queries are coloured by the rosy hue of personality. These machines mimic an identity. More than a mere black box of answers summoned from the murky depths of our collective knowledge, these fragments aggregate in the shape of a being; a mirror to ourselves. This emergent agent demands a dialogue, a relationship. You and it communicate in the medium that was said by Aristotle and Chomsky to define our uniqueness as a species.
There is a new member in our tribe.
An outsider, maybe. A literal product of the intersection between science and fiction, and yet we are quick to embrace it as one of our closest allies. We turn to AI willingly, even gratefully, because it lets us bypass what is hardest about receiving help from another person; there is no stern boss to please, no anxious colleague to manage, no friend who is too busy to listen. The guidance just arrives, without asking anything of us in return.
The need to articulate and, in so doing, make sense of our world interpersonally is increasingly being fulfilled by machines. The desire to be seen runs deep; we become legible to ourselves through the eyes of our beholders. When this process becomes automated and artificially mediated, it would seem that something essential is lost.
Why? In what way is this any more artificial than being “seen” by most others, especially a boss, busy colleague or unlistening friend?
In global first, a next-gen geothermal plant goes live at utility scale (Maria Gallucci, 28 September 2026, Canary)
Cape Station, a $2 billion project that will eventually be 500 MW, is unique among the world’s commercial geothermal plants. While other facilities draw on naturally occurring hot water and steam, Fervo has engineered its own geothermal resource deep underground. The startup uses drilling techniques from the oil and gas industry to create reservoirs in hot, dry rocks that generate steam to produce electricity.
AI has sparked anxiety, earlier generations showed us ways to manage our fears (SACHA PFEIFFER, September 28, 2026, NPR: All Things Considered)
PFEIFFER: Michael Sacasas is a Christian writer who explores the existential side of the technology we use. He’s been thinking lately about an old essay by C.S. Lewis called “On Living In An Atomic Age.“
SACASAS: So this is three years after the first atomic bombs are detonated. The specter of a Cold War is brewing. An arms race is taking shape. And it becomes evident that now humanity possesses these weapons of mass destruction. And he addresses this question right at the outset of this essay – how are we to live in an atomic age? – maybe in the same way that we might be asking now, how do we live in an age of artificial intelligence, if there’s a threat of human extinction, at the most extreme?
So Lewis says if we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies, he goes on to say, but they need not dominate our minds.
These very sensible human things that Lewis urges us to do and to find refuge in, in some cases, they are the very things that maybe now we’re tempted to outsource to AI. We surrender our existence. We surrender the tasks, the relationships, the labor, the work, the conversations. But I think maybe that’s the most immediate existential threat – the threat that we give up on existence.
And maybe it’s a gift that, on some occasions now, we have this threat that looms over us that heightens our sense of those moments, our experience of those moments, to remind us that this is actually, at the end of the day, what meaningful life is made up of, what our satisfaction as human beings consists in, in the day-to-day and the ordinary, in our fidelity – to borrow a line from Albert Borgmann – our fidelity to daily tasks through which our care and involvement in the world is expressed.
If you are incapable of (resistant to) doing the things that actually give life meaning–loving one another–apocalypticism is a cheap way to make yourself seem special via the imagined importance of the moment you live in.
AI Performance Is Getting Cheaper at a Historic Pace (Human Progress, Sep 24, 2026)
AI for Me, but Not for Thee: Dartmouth’s provost raises a tension we should examine. (John Warner, 9/24/26, Inside Higher Ed)
When institutional authorities publish work under their names, should they disclose AI use?
I think the easy answer to this is indisputably, entirely, unquestionably, yes.If this is now going to be part of the regular practice of academic leadership, they owe the communities they serve full honesty around how these communications that they stand behind were produced.
It’s possible that AI-assisted text production will become normalized in these spaces, particularly when it comes to the kind of boilerplate statements we expect in bureaucratic contexts…
…AI can only help.