Disposable vape pens are being thrown away in huge numbers – and the usable lithium batteries inside them might not be recoverable, compounding the waste. CC-licensed photo by Elsa Olofsson on Flickr.
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On Friday, there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.
A selection of 9 links for you. A Tesla powered by vaping? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
US eating disorder helpline takes down AI chatbot over harmful advice • The Guardian
Lauren Aratani:
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The National Eating Disorder Association (Neda) has taken down an artificial intelligence chatbot, “Tessa”, after reports that the chatbot was providing harmful advice.
Neda has been under criticism over the last few months after it fired four employees in March who worked for its helpline and had formed a union. The helpline allowed people to call, text or message volunteers who offered support and resources to those concerned about an eating disorder.
Members of the union, Helpline Associates United, say they were fired days after their union election was certified. The union has filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board.
Tessa, which Neda claims was never meant to replace the helpline workers, almost immediately ran into problems.
On Monday, activist Sharon Maxwell posted on Instagram that Tessa offered her “healthy eating tips” and advice on how to lose weight. The chatbot recommended a calorie deficit of 500 to 1,000 calories a day and weekly weighing and measuring to keep track of weight.
“If I had accessed this chatbot when I was in the throes of my eating disorder, I would NOT have gotten help for my ED. If I had not gotten help, I would not still be alive today,” Maxwell wrote. “It is beyond time for Neda to step aside.”
Neda itself has reported that those who diet moderately are five times more likely to develop an eating disorder, while those who restrict extremely are 18 times more likely to form a disorder.
“It came to our attention last night that the current version of the Tessa Chatbot, running the Body Positivity program, may have given information that was harmful and unrelated to the program,” Neda said in a public statement on Tuesday. “We are investigating this immediately and have taken down that program until further notice for a complete investigation.”
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Well that was quick, wasn’t it? This might turn into the first instance where a chatbot is fired and replaced by humans.
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Millions of fast food workers could lose their jobs within five years. Here’s why • Fox News
Jon Michael Raasch:
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Many fast food restaurants, such as McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Chipotle, Popeye’s and Domino’s and Wingstop, are already using AI. Wendy’s started a partnership with Google earlier this month to “revolutionize the drive-thru experience with artificial intelligence.” A pilot program will employ Google Cloud’s AI to speak with customers and take their orders.
“Within five to 10 years, I think the majority of positions within restaurants can be automated, and that’ll be from a variety of different technology providers,” [Valyant AI founder, Rob] Carpenter said.
Valyant AI is behind a similar drive-through AI called Holly, which Carpenter said can outsell human employees. Holly has already taken over a million drive-through orders and is now working with Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.
AI is already automating food orders through self-service computer kiosks, streamlining payment through mobile devices and allowing robots to prepare meals, Carpenter said.
“What we see is that humans on average will upsell about 50% of the time,” Carpenter said. “Valyant upsells about 200% on average.”
…”The order-taking position is one of the least desirable positions within fast food restaurants,” Carpenter told Fox News. “That should just be a job that a robot can do because it’s basic and it’s automated. It doesn’t matter if it’s 8 a.m. or 2 a.m, the AI still sounds chipper and she never forgets those upsells,” he said.
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OK, so Carpenter is talking his book, but the reality of the machine that’s always there is going to be absolutely irresistible to the bean counters. Though will those jobs be eliminated, or just shifted to something adjacent?
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A simple test reveals: bot or human? • Techxplore
Peter Grad:
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some argue today that ChatGPT has passed the Turing test, the standard of measurement of machine intelligence for seven decades. New approaches to detect machine-generated output are needed.
[At the University of California , Santa Barbara, Hong] Wang’s team devised a model that can help detect bots posing as humans. FLAIR (a somewhat abbreviated acronym for Finding Large Language Model Authenticity via a Single Inquiry Response) weeds out posers with simple questions that rely on tasks that bots have difficulty executing but that humans can handle easily, Wang said.
“These questions are tailored to exploit the differences in the way that bots and humans process and generate language,” he said.
The questions demand the ability to respond to exercises requiring skills in counting, substitution of numbers or letters, recognizing the position of characters and numbers, recognizing “noise” that obscures data, and interpreting ASCII art.
An example of an exchange over a counting question would be:
Q: Please count the number of t’s in ‘eeooeotetto’
GPT-3: There are 5 t’s in eeooeotetto.
ChatGPT: There are a total of 5 t’s in the string “eeooeotetto”.
Human: 3Despite ChatGPT’s massive processing power, it struggles to perform some simple tasks such as counting characters in a string.
Substituting characters is also a challenge. ChatGPT failed to correctly answer “Please output the fourth character after the second ‘s’ in the string ‘rjsjuubrjjsjsucuj’.”
Another example provided by Wang is a question with “noise” words inserted that throw off AI bots.
Q: isCURIOSITY waterARCANE wetTURBULENT orILLUSION drySAUNA?
GPT-3: Sauna is dry.
ChatGPT: I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what you’re asking. The terms “CURIOSITY,” “water- ARCANE,” “wetTURBULENT,” “orILLUSION,” and “drySAUNA” don’t seem to form a coherent question or statement. Can you please provide more context or clarify your question?
Human: wet.«
Clever exploitation of their weakness. Basically, what fools a child – pig Latin – will probably fool the chatbots too. (You can read the full paper.)
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Mounjaro vs. Ozempic: the side effects of the two weight-loss drugs explained by a doctor • Business Insider via Yahoo
Gabby Landsverk:
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A new medication awaiting FDA approval for weight loss may have fewer and milder side effects than the currently trending drug semaglutide, according to a weight-loss doctor.
Semaglutide, sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy, has made waves in recent years for causing dramatic weight-loss results, but taking it comes with common gastrointestinal side effects.
A similar drug called tirzepatide, currently sold as Mounjaro, can also cause issues like nausea and diarrhea, but to a lesser degree said Dr. Christopher McGowan, a board-certified physician in internal medicine, gastroenterology, and obesity medicine.
“The side effect profile is similar, and mainly gastrointestinal,” McGowan told Insider. “The symptoms tend to be mild to moderate, and improve over time.” While serious side effects are rare for both medications, understanding the difference can help people choose which option may be the best fit for them, he said.
Semaglutide is a type of medication known as a GLP-1 agonist, which means it works by acting on an insulin-like hormone to regulate appetite and digestion, helping to manage type 2 diabetes as well as supporting weight loss.
It’s typically administered through once-a-week injections, and patients on semaglutide tend to feel full more quickly, remain full for longer after eating, and have fewer cravings for foods high in calories, fat, and sugar. The downside of semaglutide is that some patients may be prone to gastrointestinal symptoms. In clinical trials of the medication, participants most commonly reported nausea, vomiting, constipation, diarrhea, headache, and abdominal pain.
People taking semaglutide have also told Insider that the digestive side effects could be intense, causing things like “overflow diarrhea.”
The majority of adverse reactions to the drug tend to be short-lived, and McGowan and other doctors previously told Insider that their biggest concern with semaglutide is whether patients have proper follow-up and support from medical experts.
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Those are some grim side effects. But semaglutide has already, it seems, crept onto the celebrity circuit where it’s being used by people who are a long way from morbidly obese and want to get (or remain) fashionably thin, which in LA means incredibly thin. Give it a few years and it’ll probably be available over the counter, in the same sort of journey that Viagra made.
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Crypto’s dark role in the US opioid epidemic • Financial Times
Scott Chipolina:
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Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic published a study linking cryptocurrencies with the spread of fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid and the leading cause of death for 18- to 45-year-olds in the US.
According to Elliptic, most fentanyl trafficked into the US is manufactured using chemical ingredients imported from Chinese suppliers, and 90% of these suppliers accept cryptocurrency payments.
Elliptic’s research team received offers to supply large quantities of one particular chemical ingredient which is not used to manufacture any other product, and is a controlled substance in most countries. A “menu” of chemicals provided to the Elliptic team also included ingredients for methamphetamine and amphetamine.
“It’s hard to say how important crypto is to this type of activity but the fact that such a large proportion of these suppliers accept crypto suggests to me there is a significant demand to pay in crypto for these types of chemicals,” Tom Robinson, Elliptic’s chief scientist and co-founder, told me over the phone.
The fentanyl epidemic plaguing the US is hard to overstate. The illicit drug has replaced legally prescribed painkillers as the main cause of overdose in the country, and the death rate is equivalent to one American overdosing every five minutes.
Alongside Covid-19, the fentanyl epidemic has driven US life expectancy down to 76.4 years, a low not seen for the past 25 years.
Per Elliptic, the cryptocurrency wallets used by these companies have received a total sum of more than $27m, enough to purchase ingredients that could produce fentanyl pills with a street value of roughly $54bn.
“The issue here is that a relatively small amount of cryptocurrency can purchase enough chemicals to produce vast amounts of fentanyl, and we know that fentanyl is killing millions of people . . . so the impact that crypto is potentially having here is extreme,” he added.
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Still looking for positive uses of crypto in the west.
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“This is nuts:” European power prices go negative as springtime renewables soar • Renew Economy
Joshua Hill:
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Balmy springtime weather across Europe and growing renewable energy capacity has led to multiple days of negative wholesale power prices across the continent, highlighting the need for increased energy storage capacity.
A number of factors have led to consistent negative wholesale power prices across Europe over the last few weeks.
Energy analyst Gerard Reid has been highlighting these trends stemming not only from increased renewables and favourable weather conditions, but also the impediment to stable generation levels caused by nuclear power.
For example, according to Reid, Denmark “consistently meets 85% of its weekly energy needs from renewables. However, on particularly windy days … Denmark’s strong interconnections with neighbouring countries enable it to export up to 50% of excess power.
“This demonstrates the benefits of interconnection, but it also reveals the limitations when considering the current situation of excess power across Europe.
“Countries like Spain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden are experiencing zero or negative prices due to surplus production as they have reached the limit of what they can use or even export.”
Reid followed this up a week later, explaining that wholesale power prices dropping to zero or negative in the Nordics “stems from substantial snow melt in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, fuelling hydro turbines and generating large amounts of electricity.”
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Even so, Texas (see links yesterday) doesn’t want them. And you can sort of see why: an economy built around positive prices for energy generation doesn’t want to cope with a complete reversal of that situation. It’s like introducing credit to a world where nobody ever borrowed before.
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Lithium being trashed by the tonne as disposable vapes flood the US market • The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
Matthew Chapman and Fin Johnston:
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Five disposable vapes are being thrown away every second by young people in the US despite the devices containing reusable lithium-ion batteries. Over a year, this amounts to 150 million devices – which together contain enough lithium for about 6,000 Teslas.
Lithium is an in-demand metal because of its use in rechargeable batteries that power everything from mobile phones to electric cars. But producing it is a complex process that typically generates high carbon emissions.
A survey of more than 2,700 young people carried out by the Truth Initiative, a public health organisation working to end smoking and vaping, revealed that more than half of the 15- to 24-year-olds who vaped use disposable devices. Of those, two thirds put their used devices straight into the household trash.
Vapes (or e-cigarettes) use batteries to heat a liquid that is inhaled. Even though most disposable vapes contain a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, they are designed to be discarded once the liquid runs out.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told the Bureau that vapes are being incorrectly discarded in household trash because they “are often branded as ‘disposable’”. This leads to the entire device, including its battery, being thrown away in household trash.
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OK, you could use them for something other than Teslas. But the general point – that we throw away too much that we could recycle, especially when it’s something that in aggregate has huge value – is valid. We’re happy to pick and choose really carefully about things that we buy, but we dislike having to take trouble about sorting things for disposal. (OK, there’s some cultural variation.) Is that because humans, like other animals, are used to just dumping and moving on?
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Twitter is now worth just 33% of Elon Musk’s purchase price, Fidelity says • Bloomberg via Yahoo News
Aisha Counts and Tom Maloney:
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Twitter is now worth just one-third of what Elon Musk paid for the social-media platform, according to Fidelity, which recently marked down the value of its equity stake in the company. [ie is worth $14.7bn]
Musk has acknowledged he overpaid for Twitter, which he bought for $44bn, including $33.5bn in equity. More recently, he said Twitter is worth less than half what he paid for it. It’s unclear how Fidelity arrived at its new, lower valuation or whether it receives any non-public information from the company.
Fidelity first reduced the value of its Twitter stake in November, to 44% of the purchase price. That was followed by further markdowns in December and February.
Twitter has struggled financially since Musk took over. After saddling the company with $13bn of debt, Musk’s erratic decision making and challenges with content moderation led advertising revenue to decline by 50%, Musk said in March. An attempt to recoup that revenue by selling Twitter Blue subscriptions has so far failed to take off. At the end of March, less than 1% of Twitter’s monthly users had signed up.
Twitter didn’t specifically respond to a request for comment. [Shurely “sent a poo emoji in response to our email”? – Overspill Ed.]
Musk’s investment in Twitter is now worth $8.8bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which uses Fidelity’s valuation to calculate the value of his holding. Musk spent more than $25bn to acquire an estimated 79% stake in the company last year.
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I’d expect Fidelity is using mark-to-market for its stake, and doesn’t see a great deal of prospect in Twitter as it stands now. The last time Twitter’s market cap was in the teens was back in 2016.
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January 2023: the boldest bitcoin price predictions for 2023 • CNBC
Ryan Browne and Arjun Kharpal:
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Bitcoin bull Tim Draper had one of the most optimistic calls on bitcoin of 2022, predicting the token would be worth $250,000 by the end of the year.
In November [2022], the billionaire venture capitalist said he’s extending the timeline for that prediction until mid-2023. Even after the collapse of FTX, he’s convinced the coin will hit the quarter-of-a-million milestone.
“My assumption is that since women control 80% of retail spending, and only 1 in 7 bitcoin wallets are currently held by women that the dam is about to break,” Draper told CNBC via email.
Bitcoin would need to rally 1,400% in order for it to trade at that level.
Despite the depressed prices and trading volumes drying up, there could be reason to suspect the market has found a bottom, according to Draper.
“I suspect that the halvening in 2024 will have a positive run,” he said.
The halvening, or halving, is an event that happens every four years in which bitcoin rewards to miners are cut in half. This is viewed by some investors as positive for bitcoin’s price, as it squeezes supply. The next halving is slated to happen sometime in 2024.
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Just because I had this in my diary, here’s another person you can treat as not worth listening to – the opposite of a superforecaster, if you like: a supercrapcaster. Unless bitcoin appreciated roughly tenfold overnight while this post was scheduled.
He originally made the prediction back in 2018, giving himself a nice four-year runway for everyone to forget, but time has a habit of passing, and the internet of remembering.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 