technocrit

Referred to among his supporters as a "king in exile", Reza Pahlavi, 64, is the eldest son of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the late shah of Iran, who was toppled during the 1977-1979 popular uprising that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic as we now know it.

As a staunch defender of a US-backed monarchy that he hopes to bring back to Iran, he has made several visits to Israel, taken photographs with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and cast himself as the only viable leader of a modern Iran if the Islamic Republic collapses.

On 16 June, during the recent hostilities between Israel and Iran, Pahlavi said that "the root cause of the problem has been the regime and its nature, and the only solution, ultimately, that will benefit both the Iranian people as well as the free world is for this regime to no longer be there".

Responding to Pahlavi's comments, Pakistani Defence Minister Khawaja Asif made headlines by calling the shah's son a "bloody parasitical imperial whore".

Iran says Israel kills 71 people in the attack, including staff, soldiers, prisoners and visiting family members.

In Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Diego, homeless Californians describe their experiences over the past year as camping ban enforcement has increased.

Violence begets violence, so many religions say. Americans should know. After all, the United States – a nation founded on Indigenous genocide, African enslavement and open rebellion against an imperial power to protect its wealthiest citizens – cannot help but be violent. What’s more, violence in the US is political, and the violence the country has carried out overseas over the generations has always been connected to its imperialist ambitions and racism. From the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites on June 21 to the everyday violence in rhetoric and reality within the US, the likes of President Donald Trump continue to stoke the violent impulses of a violence‑prone nation.

Almost 84,000 people died in Gaza between October 2023 and early January 2025 as a result of the Hamas–Israel war, estimates the first independent survey of deaths. More than half of the people killed were women aged 18–64, children or people over 65, reports the study, which was posted on the preprint server medRxiv last week1. It has not been peer reviewed.

Mike German, an ex-FBI agent, said immigration agents hiding their identities ‘highlights the illegitimacy of actions’

Some wear balaclavas. Some wear neck gators, sunglasses and hats. Some wear masks and casual clothes.

Across the country, armed federal immigration officers have increasingly hidden their identities while carrying out immigration raids, arresting protesters and roughing up prominent Democratic critics.

It’s a trend that has sparked alarm among civil rights and law enforcement experts alike.

Mike German, a former FBI agent, said officers’ widespread use of masks was unprecedented in US law enforcement and a sign of a rapidly eroding democracy. “Masking symbolizes the drift of law enforcement away from democratic controls,” he said.

Mike German, an ex-FBI agent, said immigration agents hiding their identities ‘highlights the illegitimacy of actions’

Some wear balaclavas. Some wear neck gators, sunglasses and hats. Some wear masks and casual clothes.

Across the country, armed federal immigration officers have increasingly hidden their identities while carrying out immigration raids, arresting protesters and roughing up prominent Democratic critics.

It’s a trend that has sparked alarm among civil rights and law enforcement experts alike.

Mike German, a former FBI agent, said officers’ widespread use of masks was unprecedented in US law enforcement and a sign of a rapidly eroding democracy. “Masking symbolizes the drift of law enforcement away from democratic controls,” he said.

We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

https://archive.ph/Fapar

We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

https://archive.ph/Fapar

Google’s carbon emissions have soared by 51% since 2019 as artificial intelligence hampers the tech company’s efforts to go green.

While the corporation has invested in renewable energy and carbon removal technology, it has failed to curb its scope 3 emissions, which are those further down the supply chain, and are in large part influenced by a growth in datacentre capacity required to power artificial intelligence.

The company reported a 27% increase in year-on-year electricity consumption as it struggles to decarbonise as quickly as its energy needs increase.

Datacentres play a crucial role in training and operating the models that underpin AI models such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT-4, which powers the ChatGPT chatbot. The International Energy Agency estimates that datacentres’ total electricity consumption could double from 2022 levels to 1,000TWh (terawatt hours) in 2026, approximately Japan’s level of electricity demand. AI will result in datacentres using 4.5% of global energy generation by 2030, according to calculations by the research firm SemiAnalysis.