Company ordered to stop work at two sites in country, which has found itself at forefront of tech firms’ latest push

Behind a wire fence lies a vast gaping wound of earth. Before Google’s arrival a few months ago, an estimated quarter of a million trees occupied the 330 hectares (815 acres) of forest near the town of Muhos in rural northern Finland. Now they are all gone.

After the tech company illegally stripped the entire area to build a datacentre – taking even the top soil with it – all that remains is a vast expanse of mud indented with the trail marks of machinery, puddles and mounds of earth, roots and branches. Residents say that brown water flowing off the site is going into a stream that feeds the Oulujoki River.

The International Monetary Fund warned Tuesday that the global economy faces serious risks from Big Tech firms taking on massive debt to fund the buildout of artificial intelligence data centers worldwide. The IMF’s latest Global Financial Stability Report outlines a number of risks to economic growth in the coming years, including a reliance on AI […]

The post IMF warns of debt-fueled AI spending as bubble fears grow appeared first on Asia Times.

As the controversy over AI safety grows, another debate is emerging. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, has said that artificial intelligence should pay taxes to compensate for the jobs that will be destroyed by the deployment of this technology.

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