Posted on 05/22/2025 5:05:13 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Doug Burgum, the soft-spoken Interior secretary responsible for managing the more than 507 million acres of federally owned land, is haunted by a fear that seems, at first glance, outside his mandate. He worries the free world will lose dominance in the field of artificial intelligence, and with it, the future.
So does the president.
“When President Trump declared a national emergency on his first day in office it was, in large part, because of what we're facing with our electrical grid and making sure that we’ve got enough power to be able to win the AI arms race with China,” Burgum said Wednesday in remarks first reported by RealClearPolitics. “That is absolutely critical.”
Thus the stated policy of this White House: “It’s called drill, baby, drill,” Trump said earlier this spring.
The immediate goal, the one touted at every campaign, is to bring down the average price of a gallon of gas. The concurrent and long-term mission that Burgum obsesses over: AI dominance. The former governor from fracking-friendly North Dakota and tech entrepreneur who sold his software to Microsoft, Burgum laid out an abbreviated formula on stage at the America First Policy Institute.
Electricity generation via fossil fuels, like natural gas and coal, powers data centers “filled with these amazing chips,” the secretary said, “and you know what comes out the other side? Intelligence. A data center is literally manufacturing intelligence.” He envisioned a new world that follows, where the best computer programmer, or the most brilliant lawyers, could “clone themselves” again and again to train AI models to do the work of thousands in a process “that can be repeated indefinitely.”
No longer science fiction, the process has been headline news for some time. AI models like ChatGPT and X’s Grok are already available in every home with...
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
Well, he’s right.
I will believe this when Micro-soft can create an operating system (Windows) without needing 600 updates. AI is no better than driverless cars, Crypto, cold fusion, cure for cancer.
What would “winning” such a race look like?
Whoever keeps the air conditioning and watercooling working and the wires pulled and terminated, is in control of the world.
Which is yet another reason the left loads us down with electric everything.
Win what exactly ?
I have had great benefit from Grok as it pertains to various medical situations.
However, I can ask a question on the Grok website and then ask same one on Twitter app . The answers can vary widely between the two because it had learned more about my situation on one over the other. Input makes a big difference .
I can upload a a radiological image and in less than a minute it can read it.
And we are not going to like it at all...
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
A project to cultivate actual human intelligence would go a long way.
What is Doug’s background and areas of expertise?
What concerns me is people using it for deep fakes. Govenments using it to violate civil liberties. It bothers me that it could be used to fake evidence of a crime.
But as you point out, medical use is a powerful and worthy application of this technology.
Own nothing and like it?
I worry about more mundane issues: Theft of my home title or savings/retirement fund. The state gov or bank allows and then tells me they are not responsible.
“Own nothing and like it?”
Yep, you bet... It will be us who is owned...
No one person or one company is going to win the AI race.
There's going to be plenty of kick ass companies at the top.
Plus countries like China who only recently came up with their staggeringly good AI from DeepSeek which even beat Chat GPT in plenty of tests.
Driver less cars are already happening from Waymo and Tesla Cybercab is out in another couple of weeks and its excellent.
Human beings will be doing this, of course .. under the watchful eyes and gun barrels of our AI overlords.
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