Nick Rosen

We can’t stop the development of Artificial Intelligence by government decree any more than we could have stopped Covid by government decree.

The sum of human knowledge used to be an unimaginably vast entity, consisting of acres of books and images, stretching across countless libraries, that could never be known by one generation, still less by one human. Now, thanks to AI, it can exist all in one place, a server farm in California, along with the algorithms that bombard it every second of every day.

The AI cat is out of the bag – $350 billion has already been invested in commercial applications, from internet search to composing music to gold prospecting.

Who knows how many tens of billions governments have already spent on military applications of AI each year? That’s a secret. The next global war will probably be fought by computers. The next generation of drones is probably being field-tested in Ukraine as we speak.

AI is potentially as big a threat to humanity as Covid was, or bigger. And many are now calling for tighter controls. But a recent appeal by Yuval Harari and several hundred leading experts, for AI research to be halted or slowed immediately has had no effect, and it may be in years before any such edict could possibly be agreed and issued, by which time according to Harari himself, AI bots may have moved beyond human control.

Harari fears computers which assimilate and recombine all human knowledge far more quickly and efficiently than humans, could take control of that knowledge unimaginably fast. He argued in a recent New York Times article, that AI could control humanity by controlling our language. He is right. All knowledge is language. Even images are a kind of language.

Nobody owns language, and never can. But fortunes are spent on pure language – the advertising, publishing, and computer software industries, have between them $1.3 trillion annual revenues. And some languages are more powerful than others.

At the heart of the debate is copyright. Who owns the entirety of human knowledge when it is recombined in new ways? Does it belong to the OpenAI computer company that is the current market leader? Or does it belong to the countless writers, researchers, publishers, photographers, filmmakers, to name but a few, whose work has now been hoovered up to feed the algorithms? And by far the largest part of what is in the AI/big tech memory banks is the entire history of all our social media, and email. It belongs to us, to all of us. But if we want to retain our ownership, the only way is to start fighting for it immediately.

The key questions is what barriers, if any, should there be to universal access to this entity, “the sum of human knowledge?” If it belongs to all of us, then should we all have …

New renewable energy projects in Britain are facing a 10-YEAR wait to get their power onto the country’s national grid.

Incompetence at the top levels of National grid PLC and OFGEM, the state regulator, has led tot he bottleneck. As a result promises made by Britain at COP26 cannot be met and net zero targets are at risk due to delays “caused by poor planning and investment in infrastructure,” according to Bloomberg.

The UK recently set out ambitious new goals to more than double existing renewable generation capacity, adding 50 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, 70GW of solar by 2035 and 24GW of nuclear by 2050.

But developers say they are being told that they will have to wait six to 10 years to connect to the regional distribution networks because of constraints on National Grid’s network.

“The majority of large developers are now seeing construction-ready projects being delayed as a result of long queues and excessive charges to get access to the transmission system,” said Catherine Cleary, specialist engineer at consultancy Roadnight Taylor, which advises companies including British Gas owner Centrica and solar developer Lightsource BP on their grid connections.

“Although there are proposals for new infrastructure, the lengthy timelines for this threaten to derail the net zero targets.”

The issue of who pays for improvements to the electricity distribution network is crucial given that it is privatised, with the FTSE 100 listed National Grid providing the bulk of the central transmission network across Great Britain and supplying the six regional monopolies whose pylons, poles, wires and cables carry electricity to end users.

The monopolies’ investments and how much they charge consumers are regulated via price controls set by watchdog Ofgem, which has been under pressure to get tough after being accused of allowing the companies to make excess profits. The regional distributors earn their revenues from a surcharge on customer bills, with up to a fifth of the typical household energy bill — or roughly £371 a year — going towards the cost of the distribution network.

National Grid says it has historically had 40-50 applications for connections a year but that this has risen to about 400 as renewables suppliers have proliferated. This is in addition to significant volumes of applications coming via the six regional distributors.

Roisin Quinn, director of customer connections at National Grid, said it was working with Ofgem and the industry to address the long queues, including by changing processes so that developers can no longer take network capacity before they have planning permission or have even started construction.

The company is proposing to upgrade the network on a project-by-project basis, building bigger substations and more overhead lines. “We are taking action at pace, along with the wider industry, to speed up the process for customers based in areas with longer waiting times,” she said.

However, the industry is concerned over the …

Gridbeyond is one of a new breed of companies, a grid aggregator offering to save money and energy for companies and communities, by selling the surplus energy they are generating or storing, back on to the grid.

Its all about resilience. In the same way that you would futureproof your apartment if you were going to put it on AirBnb, Gridbeyond futureproofs your energy system, so it is fit for purpose in the wider world of smart energy provision, as well as guaranteeing the energy provision to your own home or office.

Although this does currently require a grid connection, in the future off-grid communities could make use of the same technologies to balance the loads between them and share resources.

Part of the service is the way it stores cheap grid electricity when prices are low and then releases it (possibly the same day) when prices rises, with batteries paid for and housed by their clients.

In old fashioned terms the deal they are offering is arbitrage – taking advantage of market volatility to take a cut.

But its more sophisticated than that.

The Gridbeyond version of the service treats energy as a “Flexible asset” in order to “monetise the flexibility,” CEO Padraig Curran told me. Gridbeyond takes the flexibility clients have (whether in generation, storage or demand), and uses it to obtain the best prices both for buying and selling power on a minute by minute basis with the grid operator and energy market.
“You have huge amounts of flexibility in homes – the trick is to harness it in a cost effective way –we are all becoming more interconnected – this will be the gateway.”

Gridbeyond focuses on industrial processes – water, paper, cement – with larger power generation resource and patchy demand – long intervals of low or no demand, followed by a need for large amounts of power at short notice. Again – the same principles apply in any situation where there is a worthwhile amount of surplus power generated at certain points of the day.

The profits from the Flexibility are used to” fund battery deployments behind the meter,” said Curran

Resilience

“We are permanently monitoring the system – the generation, storage, and any demand or other constraint on supply” he said.

This where the designers can build in resilience so they are never caught out by peaks in prices – they do this by monitoring and controlling –their software allows them to go into any site – “any asset “ as Padraig Curran calls it – meaning any machine, generator or motor –using electronic sensors which communicate back to the key software.

One day the whole grid will work like this – only it wont be a grid any more – it will be a non-hierarchical set of autonomous systems that communicate via the internet and permanently allow energy trading between any two …