Donald Campbell

This is interesting on the UK Govt - maybe - quietly shelving the AI Action Plan. Potentially good news if they're moving away from having their policies written by venture capitalists, as the AIAP was. www.themorningintelligence.uk/uk-ai-action...

In the rush to build data centers, companies are starting to use their own off grid gas generators. This results in much higher emissions – 60% to 80% – compared with using their local electricity grid and risks locking in longer-term fossil dependence. www.theclimatebrink....

This is real wallet-inspector stuff. The MoD asked *Palantir* to tell them how to buy tech. And Palantir, which has done very well out of non-competitive procurement, said: ‘yes, more of that please’.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if your "sovereign AI task force" consists of Microsoft, Nvidia, and some of Nvidia's satellites, then it's maybe not very "sovereign": www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

"Similar to an LLM, AlphaFold is a powerful neural network running on silicon hardware. Yet almost nobody worries that it might be conscious. That’s because AlphaFold predicts protein structures, whereas LLMs ‘talk’ to us." www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Some interesting comment in here from regulator bosses - in short, without govt action, the UK public will bear the cost of Big Tech's data centres. NESO's chief exec on rollout: "Do it wrong though and absolutely it will lead to potentially rising prices or issues on the [energy] system.”

🟣 SUBSTACK Facebook Posts ‘Led To My Dad’s Murder’ By @goldbergradio.bsky.social Read below. ↓

Internal documents reveal Amazon is using an AI risk-scoring tool to surveil union activity among its workers: www.computerweekly.com/news/3666521...

A good example of how US tech giants look out for each other: Meta blocks the instagram account of Indian community groups opposing a Google data centre.

'The "Stop Dirty Data Centres" campaign regularly canvasses villagers and neighbourhoods next to the three construction sites which make up Google's AI hub. Recently Meta blocked the campaign's Instagram account under India's information technology rules.' www.cbc.ca/news/world/a...

Spot on from @privateeyenews.bsky.social @sussexwildlife.bsky.social www.private-eye.co.uk/in-the-back

"These facilities could lock America into decades of continued fossil fuel dependence."

🚗 HOW DO YOU CROSS SAFELY WHEN YOU CAN’T SEE? Bigger vehicles can block sightlines and make it harder for people - especially children - to see and be seen when crossing. Support @cleancitiescampaign.org #Carspreading campaign cleancitiescampaign.org/join-the-mov... #SafeStreets

Interesting piece on Conservative donors' data centre interests - given the party voted against a pause on development in the Scottish Parliament. @spotlightcorruption.org say it “raises serious questions around conflicts of interest.”

"Do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what's going on in the world?” one of the judges asked the lawyer, who submitted false testimony and witnesses after using ChatGPT. www.404media.co/chatgpt-fake...

Come to my book launch in London on October 26! It won’t just be me! @foxglovelegal.bsky.social, @macrodosepod.bsky.social, @sarahljaffe.bsky.social, and more will be there too. A fantastic night of data centre resistance. Tickets going fast. You won’t want to miss it!

This is alarming. The iplayer is one of the last sanctuaries from this kind of stuff. Plus just from a practical point of view, I don't see how the BBC can compete as just a less-well-funded Netflix?

Lord Watson's "mob" includes: - NHS data experts - the cross-party Tech and Health committees in the Commons - the British Medical Association There's a huge, broad-based coalition opposing Palantir's NHS contract. The firm is desperate to claim otherwise.

Weird to hear Palantir lobbyist Lord Watson on the BBC this morning claiming there's "no disagreement" that the firm is "significantly improving the service to [NHS] patients." That's exactly what there is disagreement on (!) The Govt's been forced to admit the Palantir claims don't stand up.

The public should not be paying for the social and environmental costs of Big Tech's data centres. Join our call on Andy Burnham to stop the construction of data centres that will harm the climate or the local community: you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/ba...

The Aarhus Convention being attacked here underpins Enviromental Information Requests. So the result of this policy could be that private water companies - which are exempt from FOI - are able to hide information on pollution and other harms to England's rivers. www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

This WSJ piece on the devastation Big Tech - esp Google - is causing to the US edu system is staggering, even if you already thought things were bad. A sense of near-total capture by corporate interests and PR, with outcomes nosediving as a result: www.wsj.com/tech/ai/goog...

'Catastrophic': Swiss glaciers lose 20% of mass in five years. Swiss glaciers saw 5.5% of their volume melt away just this year, the second-biggest melt on record, Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOS) network reports u.afp.com/S9B2

Voluntary regulation of big tech doesn’t work, in shock news www.themorningintelligence.uk/google-withh...

I had heard of Trump's 'Pax Silica' but I had missed the Pentagon seeing the EIC as a model for US tech dominance. It's front and centre of Trump's AI Strategy as well. We can't say they haven't warned us, yet countries are cheerfully signing up to this stuff. www.ft.com/content/bc17...

Another reminder that lethal injection has never been about a 'humane' process - it's often excruciating for the victim, but it presents a more sanitised appearance, aimed at making it socially acceptable. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Telling wording here - Peter Thiel still isn't a fan of democracy, apparently:

"These contractors are not being hired to flag or vet offensive or inappropriate content. They are being paid to review the quality of Copilot’s output, including in these cases of sexual imagery." So far as I can tell MS have put an abusive image generator into Office. Have they lost their minds.

NO TO PALANTIR 🚫 120+ organisations and unions across Europe call for the scrapping of all existing public sector contracts with Palantir.

Another dodgy statement from the UK Govt's response to the #Countryfile piece on data centres last night. Have ministers made any assessment of the emissions new AI data centres will also enable? EG: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Very surprising to see this claim from the UK Govt on data centres and carbon targets when they (1) very clearly have not accounted for growing data centre emissions in their carbon budgets and (2) by their own admission don't know how much water data centres are using.

The tech industry often claims UK data centres don't use significant volumes of water for cooling. If that's so, how do they explain one water supplier receiving an application from a data centre to use 21m litres a day? (according to WaterUK, see www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis... at 22.14)

Palantir has hired former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson ahead of a December government decision on a break clause that could end its £330 million role in the NHS's data platform. Foxglove's Martha Dark writes that his "new position contrasts starkly with his public views a decade ago."

I see a lot of people complaining about the undoubtedly stressful conditions at present on London's roads. But I see few people complaining about motor vehicles. Yet in the last 24 hours three vulnerable road users have died after being hit by people driving motor vehicles.

Either this, or there’ll be an arms race of the kind already seen in recruitment (AI assessments vs AI applications) and we’ll end up with a system that uses far more energy to produce a slightly worse result.

Good piece from @marthadark.bsky.social on Palantir's new lobbyist: "in 2015, he brought a legal challenge against the UK Government over its plans to 'spy on citizens.' Now, he’s taking up a role at the world’s most prominent spy-tech company."

Every so often I'm reminded of this essential story about how Palantir operates in trying to win public contracts. It's from 2022 but anyone interested how they've built up such a big role in the NHS and wider UK public sector should read it. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

AI smart glasses & covert filming are a real threat to women's & girls’ safety. That’s why I’m campaigning to: 👮 Make covert filming a specific criminal offence. ❌ Force platforms to remove this content. 🕶️ Require a visible recording indicator on smart glasses & make it an offence to conceal it.

He means this, presumably

One striking thing from this Tom Watson statement: he doesn't cite a single concrete stat about how Palantir has helped the NHS. He goes with a vaguely worded hypothetical instead. They've been running the Federated Data Platform since 2023. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

"In past conflicts, preparing lists of proposed targets...had taken hours for staffers to complete. Ahead of the US attack on Iran, much of that work was condensed into several minutes via [Palantir's] Maven, people involved in the Pentagon’s internal review said." www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...