In Portugal, an amazing 95% of electricity came from renewables through April. CC-licensed photo by Vitor Oliveira on Flickr.

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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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A selection of 9 links for you. That’s hot. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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It’s the end of Google Search as we know it • WIRED

Lauren Goode:

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Eight months ago [SEO company] BrightEdge developed something it calls a generative parser, which monitors what happens when searchers interact with AI-generated results on the web. He says over the past month the parser has detected that Google is less frequently asking people if they want an AI-generated answer, which was part of the experimental phase of generative search, and more frequently assuming they do. Jim Yu, executive chair of BrightEdge says: “We think it shows they have a lot more confidence that you’re going to want to interact with AI in search, rather than prompting you to opt in to an AI-generated result.”

Changes to search also have major implications for Google’s advertising business, which makes up the vast majority of the company’s revenue. In a recent quarterly earnings call, Pichai declined to share revenue from its generative AI experiments broadly. But as WIRED’s Paresh Dave pointed out, by offering more direct answers to searchers, “Google could end up with fewer opportunities to show search ads if people spend less time doing additional, more refined searches.” And the kinds of ads shown may have to evolve along with Google’s generative AI tools.

Google has said it will prioritize traffic to websites, creators, and merchants even as these changes roll out, but it hasn’t pulled back the curtain to reveal exactly how it plans to do this.

When asked in a press briefing ahead of I/O whether Google believes users will still click on links beyond the AI-generated web summary, Reid said that so far Google sees people “actually digging deeper, so they start with the AI overview and then click on additional websites.”

In the past, [Google head of search Liz] Reid continued, a searcher would have to poke around to eventually land on a website that gave them the info they wanted, but now Google will assemble an answer culled from various websites of its choosing. In the hive mind at the Googleplex, that will still spark exploration. “[People] will just use search more often, and that provides an additional opportunity to send valuable traffic to the web,” Reid said.

It’s a rosy vision for the future of search, one where being served bite-size AI-generated answers somehow prompts people to spend more time digging deeper into ideas. Google Search still promises to put the world’s information at our fingertips, but it’s less clear now who is actually tapping the keys.

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Google is delusional if it thinks it can provide correct – as in accurate, truthful – answers to queries. It didn’t manage it in the first 25 years, and adding an LLM won’t change that.
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For tech CEOs, the dystopia is the point • Blood in the Machine

Brian Merchant:

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When OpenAI debuted its new voice interface program, ChatGPT-4o, it quickly invited a flood of comparisons to Her, the 2013 Spike Jones film in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a program voiced by Scarlett Johansson. The comparison was encouraged by OpenAI — both in the very design of the flirty voice agent itself, which sounds suspiciously like Johansson, and by CEO Sam Altman himself, who tweeted “her” as the demo was underway.

In response, observers — myself included — took to what’s become a time-honored internet tradition: pointing out that the science fictional reference point a tech founder put forward was not an aspirational one, but, in fact, a dystopia containing a warning meant to be heeded, not emulated.

“I Am Once Again Asking Our Tech Overlords to Watch the Whole Movie,” Wired’s Brian Barrett wrote in a fun piece that runs through recent some recent offenders in the genre, including Elon Musk and his suggestion that the Cybertruck is “what bladerunner [sic] would have driven,” and Mark Zuckerberg’s love of the metaverse, the idea for which came from Snowcrash and Ready Player One — both pessimistic cyberpunk dystopias.

“Begging the AI companies building stuff modeled on “Her” to finish the movie!” the New York Times’ Kevin Roose wrote on X. “It does not end well!”

That tech executives have a penchant for mining inspiration from dystopian sci-fi films and books has become a running gag at this point — I wrote a longish piece for Motherboard (RIP) needling Zuck for trying to cash in on a dystopian metaverse back in 2021 — but maybe best nailed by the infamous Torment Nexus tweet.
[Sci-fi author: in my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: at long last we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.]

That’s the gist of it! And yet. As much as we needle, or mock, or point out that the tech titans are stripping their references and products of context — it’s all in vain. The CEOs obviously don’t much care what some flyby cultural critics think of their branding aspirations, but beyond even that, we have to bear in mind that these dystopias are actively useful to them.

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What really happens when emissions vanish • BNN Bloomberg

Ben Elgin and Sinduja Rangarajan:

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Procter & Gamble Co. vowed to cut its heat-trapping emissions in half by 2030, before announcing it had surpassed its target a decade early. Cisco Systems Inc. recently said it had exceeded a goal to reduce its climate pollution by 60% over 15 years. Continental AG, the German tire and auto parts juggernaut, claimed it had slashed greenhouse gases by an astounding 70% in 2020.

These appear to be exactly the kind of giant leaps needed to forestall the most destructive impacts of climate change. But a substantially different picture emerges when using a different accounting method that more accurately measures the pollution from a company’s operations. Procter & Gamble more realistically cut its emissions by 12%, Continental’s pollution fell a more pedestrian 8%, and Cisco’s actually climbed 22%.

In the cases of each of these companies—along with similar claims made by hundreds of others—they’re relying on a common, but controversial, form of climate bookkeeping known as “market-based accounting.” This allows businesses to buy credits from clean energy providers to say they’re running on green power when they actually aren’t, wiping from their ledgers vast quantities of pollution caused by the electricity powering their offices, data centers, and factories.

…When wind or solar farms sell their power to the grid, they get paid for the electricity like any other power plant. The owners of clean energy resources also usually get tax credits from governments. To increase the incentives, corporations began paying the renewable plants an extra bonus for the right to take credit for that clean energy.

This approach relies on a measure of fiction. The corporate buyers never physically use the clean electricity, yet they can claim credit for zero-emission energy on their ledgers.

Many companies became enamored with this method as they discovered it could seemingly wipe away vast quantities of emissions in a hurry. But market-based accounting sparked a bitter debate. The US Environmental Protection Agency and nonprofits such as CDP embraced it as a way to funnel more money into clean energy, believing these extra payments from companies would accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. On the other side, dozens of academics cringed at the idea of allowing companies to take credit for green energy they hadn’t actually used, fearing it would warp the accuracy of emissions reports and provide a cheap cop-out instead of meaningful greenhouse gas cuts.

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Renewables are meeting 95% of Portugal’s electricity needs. How did it become a European leader? • Euronews

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Portugal generated an ‘historic’ 95% of its electricity from renewables in April, according to the network operator REN.

Renewable energy generation averaged just below that for the first four months of the year, covering 91% of the nation’s power needs. It’s one national good news story within a great continental shift: fossil fuels provided less than a quarter of the EU’s energy for the first time ever last month.

Ember, the clean think tank behind that assessment, also found that more than 30% of the world’s electricity is now generated using renewables. “Solar in particular is accelerating faster than anyone thought possible,” Ember’s director of global insights, Dave Jones told us.

…Portugal has made some huge strides in renewable power, up from 27% in 2005 and 54% in 2017.

It phased out coal-fired generation in 2021, and boosted its large hydropower fleet with added storage capacity. And since 2019, the state’s renewable energy auctions have been increasing utility-scale projects, with clear guidance for green companies.

All this has laid the ground for some milestone moments. For six consecutive days last autumn, for example, renewable energy production actually exceeded the country’s electricity needs.

Portugal had the third highest share of wind energy in its electricity mix last year at 29%, behind Ireland (36%) and Denmark (58%). But, as elsewhere, it’s no good a renewable leader resting on its laurels. Ember’s new European Electricity Review report notes that Portugal has still not moved past the peak in wind generation it achieved in 2019.

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UK peaks for April: 48% total from renewables (including biomass); wind making up 31% of demand. Helps if, like Portugal, you’re by the sea and have lots of sunlight.
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Southeast Asian scam syndicates stealing $64bn annually, researchers say • The Record

James Reddick:

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Online fraud operations in Southeast Asia continue to grow, with organized scamming syndicates netting an estimated $64 billion each year worldwide, according to new research. 

In Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, the criminal groups are stealing about $43.8bn each year through scams — some 40% of the three nations’ combined formal GDP — according to a report released Monday from the United States Institute of Peace. 

The scams typically involve pig butchering, when potential victims are contacted on messaging platforms or dating apps. The scammers try to develop relationships and eventually convince victims to make fraudulent investments which are siphoned off by criminals. 

“This has gone from being very much a regional issue that was focused on criminal markets within the region to a global issue in a very short period of time,” Jason Tower, Myanmar country director at USIP, said during an event to discuss the research.  “And it’s spreading into other countries… There’s new linkages into the Middle East, into Africa, that the same criminal actors are beginning to exploit.”

The researchers noted that in recent months there has been a “massive upsurge in the targeting of victims who are not Chinese and do not speak Mandarin” — perhaps as a response to Chinese law enforcement’s increasing scrutiny of the industry. 

Last year, such scams resulted in about $3.5bn in losses in the US, while Canadians lost an estimated $413m and Malaysians more than $750m, researchers said. 

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Of note, the report says: “The scamming operations are powered by hundreds of thousands of people, many duped by fraudulent online ads for lucrative high-tech jobs and trafficked illegally into scam compounds, where they are held by armed gangs in prisonlike conditions and forced to run online scams.” That’s scary.
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Leonardo police spy tech scans cars for phones, pets and books • Forbes

Thomas Brewster:

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American police are testing a new technology that can scan moving vehicles for anything that emits a signal, including phones, smartwatches, cat and dog tracking chips and even library books, according to its creator, Rome, Italy-based surveillance, defense and aerospace company Leonardo.

The nascent technology, called Elsag EOC Plus, is typically incorporated into one of Leonardo’s Elsag license plate readers, though can be deployed as a standalone surveillance device, and is designed to help police monitor suspects as they move. But privacy advocates told Forbes the new technology could be abused to warrantlessly track people across large tranches of the country, learning more about them by identifying their belongings without their knowledge.

Leonardo claims the tool can identify specific models of devices like iPhones and Bose headphones inside moving vehicles, according to a marketing brochure from the Milipol conference in Paris last year. It can also identify unique signals emitted by pet chips, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices, wearable tech like fitness trackers, in-car infotainment systems and tire pressure sensors, and can even detect the RFID of a library book, according to the brochure. For law enforcement, all that data can be linked to a car’s license plate number, becoming a unique “fingerprint.” As a person travels through other license plate scanners, their fingerprint can be followed around a given area, even when the driver or passenger switches vehicles.

“As an example, while 30 cars in 100 may contain iPhones, only one will have an iPhone 13rev2, an Audi radio, a pair of Bose headphones, a Garmin sports watch, a key finder and the license plate ABC-1234. The collection of data represented by these specific things is an electronic signature,” Leonardo explained in its brochure.

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As you might imagine, privacy groups are not enamoured of this. It seems to be “novel police technology” week, though.
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Smiles, waves and flashed body parts: video portal links Dublin and New York • The Guardian

Rory Carroll:

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Rain sluiced down on a grey Dublin afternoon but the crowd clustering around the portal ignored the downpour and waved at a man cycling towards the screen on a sunny morning in Manhattan.

He gazed back, waved and wobbled before recovering his balance and vanishing down Fifth Avenue, eliciting a cheer from the sodden observers on North Earl Street.

Monday was day five of a live stream that has connected Ireland’s capital with New York via an interactive sculpture and webcam that allows people to see, but not hear, each other.

Seconds after the cyclist, a woman appeared walking her dog. She stopped, stared at the screen and grinned. She picked up her dog and waved his paw. The crowd in Dublin, huddled under umbrellas, gave another cheer. “I wish I’d brought my dog,” said Amy Ferguson, 24.

The fleeting, playful interactions between people separated by 3,000 miles and five time zones exemplified the hope of authorities when the art installation launched on 8 May. “Two amazing global cities connected in real time and space,” said New York’s chief public realm officer, Ya-Ting Liu.

“I would encourage Dubliners and visitors to the city to come and interact with the sculpture and extend an Irish welcome and kindness to cities all over the world,” said Dublin’s lord mayor, Daithí de Róiste.

Not all, however, have followed that utopian exhortation. Some on the Irish side have flashed body parts, while others displayed images of swastikas and the twin towers aflame on 9/11. One man made a theatrical show of snorting what appeared to be cocaine. Police escorted away a woman who was grinding against the portal.

“Portal to hell: NYC-Dublin live video art installation already bringing out the worst in people,” lamented the New York Post, which blamed Dublin’s “Guinness-glugging patrons”.

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Such a simple, fabulous idea: the thing we’ve seen in so many SF TV shows and films made real. Apart from the stepping through and going there. The choice (one assumes it’s a choice?) not to include sound is peculiar, though. Naturally, within a few hours, the portal in New York was fenced off. Spoilsports.
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Don’t fret about green subsidies • Project Syndicate

Dani Rodrik:

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China has scaled up its green industries with mind-boggling speed. It now produces nearly 80% of the world’s solar PV modules, 60% of wind turbines, and 60% of electric vehicles and batteries. In 2023 alone, its solar-power capacity grew by more than the total installed capacity in the US. These investments were driven by a variety of government policies at the national, provincial, and municipal levels, allowing Chinese firms to travel rapidly down the learning curve to dominate their respective markets.

But there is a big difference between solar PV cells, electric vehicles, and batteries, on one hand, and older industries such as steel and gas-powered cars. Green technologies are crucial in the fight against climate change, making them a global public good. The only way we can decarbonize the planet without undermining economic growth and poverty reduction is to shift to renewables and green technologies as rapidly as possible.

The case for subsidizing green industries, as China has done, is impeccable. Beyond the usual argument that new technologies provide know-how and other positive externalities, one also must account for the immeasurable costs of climate change and the huge prospective benefits of accelerating the green transition. Moreover, because the knowledge spillovers cross national borders, China’s subsidies benefit not only consumers everywhere, but also other firms along the global supply chain.

Another powerful argument follows from second-best reasoning. If the world were organized by a social planner, there would be a global carbon tax; but, of course, there is no such thing. Although a variety of regional, national, and subnational carbon-pricing schemes do exist, only a tiny share of global emissions is subject to a price that comes close to covering the true social cost of carbon.

Under these circumstances, green industrial policies are doubly beneficial – both to stimulate the necessary technological learning and to substitute for carbon pricing. Western commentators who trot out scare words like “excess capacity,” “subsidy wars,” and “China trade shock 2.0” have gotten things exactly backwards. A glut in renewables and green products is precisely what the climate doctor ordered.

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The iPad Pro Manifesto (2024 Edition) • High Caffeine Content

Steve Troughton-Smith is a very (very) experienced Mac and iOS developer:

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Another year, another series of incredibly-overpowered new iPads Pro, another round of ‘…shame the software sucks, though’ reviews. But ‘sucks’ means different things to different people, and it’s been a while since I put together an iPad manifesto so I thought I’d delineate where I think iPadOS is dropping the ball or needs improvement specifically from a core OS/developer perspective.

Below are the tentpoles that I think should be, need to be, addressed to make iPad Pro live up to the expectations of its monstrously-powerful M-series chip and multi-thousand-dollar asking price.

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They’re all the sorts of things you’d expect, but most of all, given that the latest iPads have an M4 chip which makes most PCs on the market look a bit sluggish, it’s utterly obvious that Apple has some sort of strategy tax around the Mac: it can’t accept that the iPad could and should compete on a level playing field, so it doesn’t put the effort in to make it a first-class citizen. Is the fear that people will stop buying Macs? The problem at the moment is that not enough people are buying tablets.

There’s an equally good article by Federico Viticci at MacStories on the same topic; his requests are more as a user, but it all washes out to the same thing.
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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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified