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1000 results for “PartnershipAI”
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#ByteDance is promoting its #AIchatbot app #Cici in the #UK, #Mexico, and #Indonesia through ads and influencer partnerships. https://www.wired.com/story/bytedances-ai-chatbot-is-quietly-gaining-traction-around-the-world/?AIagents.at #AIagent #AI #ML #NLP #LLM #GenAI
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#ByteDance is promoting its #AIchatbot app #Cici in the #UK, #Mexico, and #Indonesia through ads and influencer partnerships. https://www.wired.com/story/bytedances-ai-chatbot-is-quietly-gaining-traction-around-the-world/?AIagents.at #AIagent #AI #ML #NLP #LLM #GenAI
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#ByteDance is promoting its #AIchatbot app #Cici in the #UK, #Mexico, and #Indonesia through ads and influencer partnerships. https://www.wired.com/story/bytedances-ai-chatbot-is-quietly-gaining-traction-around-the-world/?AIagents.at #AIagent #AI #ML #NLP #LLM #GenAI
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#ByteDance is promoting its #AIchatbot app #Cici in the #UK, #Mexico, and #Indonesia through ads and influencer partnerships. https://www.wired.com/story/bytedances-ai-chatbot-is-quietly-gaining-traction-around-the-world/?AIagents.at #AIagent #AI #ML #NLP #LLM #GenAI
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#ByteDance is promoting its #AIchatbot app #Cici in the #UK, #Mexico, and #Indonesia through ads and influencer partnerships. https://www.wired.com/story/bytedances-ai-chatbot-is-quietly-gaining-traction-around-the-world/?AIagents.at #AIagent #AI #ML #NLP #LLM #GenAI
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https://www.europesays.com/africa/234543/ Smart Africa and RealTyme Expand Cybersecurity Partnership to Strengthen Africa’s Digital Defenses #Africa
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Ford and Geely in talks for manufacturing, technology partnership, sources say
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https://www.europesays.com/africa/146540/ Nigerians berate Tinubu govt’s partnership with Coventry University to bring UK degrees to Nigeria #AlaroCity #news #Nigeria #NigerianNews #PresidentBolaTinubu’sAdministration #TunjiAlausa #tvet #UnitedKingdom
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Kalshi Announces Partnership with MMA Legend Nate Diaz Ahead of His Highly Anticipated Return to the Octagon | National Business
NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 12, 2026– Kalshi, the world’s largest prediction market, today announced a new multi-tiered partnership with…
#NewsBeep #News #MMA #CA #Canada #Fighting #national_business #Sports
https://www.newsbeep.com/ca/664911/ -
VISA INC. DROPS MILAN FASHION WEEK!
Visa Inc. waives the white flag after just 7 days...FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Visa Inc. Drops Sponsorship of Milan Fashion Week After Anti-Fur Protests
International– (April 14, 2026) – Visa has officially ended its partnership with Milan Fash
https://abolishfur.org/visa-surrenders/
#News #AbolishFur #AnimalLiberation #AnimalRights #antifur #caft #CaftUsa #CoalitionToAbolishTheFurTrade #fashion #fur #MilanFashionWeek #sustainablefashion #VisaInc -
Oklo completes drilling for first small modular reactor at Idaho site, narrows Q1 losses, and advances commercialization efforts amid stock price surge and strategic partnerships.
#YonhapInfomax #Oklo #SmallModularReactor #IdahoNationalLaboratory #Q1Earnings #CommercialPowerProduction #Economics #FinancialMarkets #Banking #Securities #Bonds #StockMarket
https://en.infomaxai.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=63251 -
- Oklo Clears Environmental Reviews at INL
- Westinghouse Signs Engineering Contract for AP1000 Reactors in Bulgaria
- Great British Nuclear Issues ‘Invitation To Negotiate’ To Four SMR Companies
- Texas A&M University Proposes Sites for Reactor Test Beds
- World Economic Forum Publishes Framework for Advanced Nuclear Power
- IAEA Highlights ‘Pressing Need’ For International Finance For Nuclear Plants
Oklo Clears Environmental Review for INL Micro Reactor
Oklo checked off a significant milestone in its path forward toward building a first of a kind micro reactor on a site at the Idaho National Laboratory. This was the environmental review processes of the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Idaho National Laboratory required for construction of the firm’s first micro reactor on the federal site. It is targeting its first deployment at INL in 2027.
Jacob DeWitte, CEO and Co-Founder of Oklo, said the approvals are a “pivotal step forward as we advance toward deploying the first commercial advanced fission plant.”
DeWitt added that, “With this process complete, we can begin site characterization.”
This announcement follows the recent final sign off on a Memorandum of Agreement with the DOE, which initiates site characterization activities. It also follows DOE’s approval of Oklo’s Conceptual Safety Design Report for its Aurora Fuel Fabrication Facility, which will recycle nuclear material at INL to fuel the Aurora powerhouse.
Oklo is developing next-generation fission powerhouses, starting with the Aurora micro reactor, which can produce 15 MW of electrical power, scalable to 50 MWe, and operate for 10 years or longer before refueling. Oklo’s fast reactors incorporate key safety features and can be fueled by recycled waste.
DeWitt noted that “Our business model of selling power directly to customers rather than power plants positions us to respond to a growing order book effectively and meet diverse energy needs across data centers, industrial processes, defense, and off-grid communities.”
Supply Chain Agreement
Last December Oklo named Siemens Energy as its preferred supplier in an MOU on advanced fission power plant deployments. Siemens Energy would become Oklo’s preferred supplier for steam turbines and generator technology for its Aurora powerhouse.
Siemens Energy would also provide consulting to support Oklo in related design work to optimize the integration of the power conversion systems (conventional island). This partnership will help develop the capability to scale of the Aurora powerhouse deployments for customers. The Aurora powerhouse is designed to offer power ratings of 15-50 MWe.
Multiple Project Sites
Oklo has three project sites. A site use permit for its first location was granted by the Department of Energy in 2019. The firm was awarded fuel for its first reactor from Idaho National Laboratory. Oklo is currently doing work with the Idaho National Laboratory to take the waste fuel from EBR-II and use it for the first Aurora Powerhouse.
Centrus HALEU Production
In August 2023 Oklo and Centrus Energy signed an MOU for fuel, components, and power procurement to support the deployment of advanced fission technologies in Piketon, OH. The parties intend to enter into one or more definitive agreements relating to the following collaborative activities addressed in the MOU:
- Oklo would purchase HALEU from the production facility Centrus is planning to build in Piketon, Ohio, which is licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to produce HALEU.
- Centrus would purchase electricity from the Aurora powerhouses that Oklo is planning to build in Piketon. These two power plants are designed to power thousands of homes and businesses in addition to the HALEU production facility. The HALEU production plant is designed to be scaled up to support hundreds of reactors.
- Centrus would manufacture components for Oklo’s Aurora powerhouse at Centrus’ advanced manufacturing facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as well as manufacturing capacity at the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio, where HALEU production will take place.
- Centrus and Oklo would work together to establish and license the capabilities necessary to deconvert HALEU from uranium hexafluoride to uranium metal and fabricate fuel assemblies for Oklo’s Aurora powerhouses.
Two Plants for Piketon, OH
In February 2024 Oklo announced the signing of a lands right agreement with the non-profit Southern Ohio Diversification Initiative (SODI) for land including options for the siting of two plants.
This agreement is an extension of Oklo and SODI’s announcement in May 2023, related to the deployment of two Aurora powerhouses. SODI is a nonprofit community improvement corporation and serves as the DOE-designated community reuse organization for the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS) facility near Piketon, Ohio.
Subject to the terms and conditions of the land rights agreement and, in exchange for an upfront fee, which will be credited toward any purchase by Oklo under the land rights agreement, SODI has granted Oklo an option and right of first refusal to purchase land in Southern Ohio from SODI.
Oklo aims to build its second and third plants on land owned by SODI. The land will host two commercial 15 MWe Aurora powerhouses (30 MWe total) with opportunities to expand.
According to a company press statement, Oklo’s Aurora powerhouse reactor will cost around $70 million for the 15 MWe version, with levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of somewhere between $80-$130/MWh, depending on use and location.
Other Pending Deals
Oklo formed a strategic partnership with Atomic Alchemy to produce medical isotopes from its recycling of spent fuel process for cancer treatment and diagnostic imaging.
Separately, it signed a non-binding letter of intent (LOI) with Wyoming Hyperscale to collaborate on a 20-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) to supply 100 MW to its data center expected to be located in Cheyenne, WY.
Also, Oklo signed a non-binding LOI to collaborate on another 20-year PPA with Diamondback Energy to supply power to its shale-oil operations in the Permian Basin Texas.
Funding Status
In May 2024 Oklo Inc. (NYSE:OKLO) began trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). This milestone follows the completion of its business combination with AltC Acquisition Corp. on 05/09/24.
Oklo has received $306 million in gross proceeds from the transaction before taking into account expenses associated with the transaction, which is expected to be used to execute Oklo’s business plan and fund the initial deployment of the company’s Aurora powerhouse. A key company focus is to develop and submit a license application to the NRC and to successfully complete that regulatory process.
Oklo announced its newly appointed board of directors comprised of industry leaders with Sam Altman serving as chairman of the board. Sam Altman, Chairman of Oklo since 2015 and former Chief Executive Officer of AltC, said, “There are huge growth opportunities ahead for the firm.”
NRC Licensing Update
Oklo is engaged with the NRC in pre-application activities interactions for the Oklo Aurora Powerhouse reactor. The proposed Oklo reactors are liquid metal-cooled, metal-fueled fast reactors with an initial power level of 15 MWe. Oklo has promoted the design as being scalable to 50 MWe.
Oklo submitted its latest regulatory engagement plan with the NRC in 3Q2023. However, the firm requested that the details of the plan be restricted from public view due to the proprietary nature of some of the information in it. The NRC’s web pages for the pre-application activity and docket are current as of October 2024.
The NRC has not indicated on its web site a calendar of milestones leading to a date for a license application from the firm which is expected under the agency’s Part 52 licensing regulations. These regulations are applicable to early site permits, design certifications, combined licenses, design approvals, or manufacturing licenses.
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Westinghouse Signs Engineering Contract for AP1000 Reactors in Bulgaria
Westinghouse Electric Company, Hyundai Engineering & Construction Co. and Bulgaria’s Kozloduy NPP – New Build EAD have signed the Engineering Services Contract for two AP1000 reactors to be built at the Kozloduy site.
The contract scope includes site planning for two Westinghouse AP1000 units. In addition, the contract provides support for Kozloduy NPP – New Build EAD to begin licensing and permitting, while providing critical project planning and operations & maintenance development. The work outlined in the 12-month contract will begin immediately.
Bulgaria’s first AP1000 nuclear reactor is anticipated to achieve commercial operation in 2035. Westinghouse has already signed Memoranda of Understanding with 22 Bulgarian suppliers to support the project. The two-unit Kozloduy project will also provide Bulgarian firms opportunities to support the construction of other AP1000 units globally.
Former minister of energy Rumen Radev has said Bulgaria would like the cost of the two-unit project to not exceed $14 billion (€12.9bn). He added that the idea is to implement the project entirely on public funds with up to 25–30% percent self-financing. The rest is to be loan-financed for part of which Bulgarian State guarantees will be furnished. Minister Radev, has said that the electricity from the new Kozloduy reactors will cost €65/MWh.
According to trade press reports in March 2024, questions were raised about the economic basis for the project. Valentin Kolev, energy analyst and member of the American Association of Energy Engineers, told Euractiv:
“It will be very difficult to find banks to finance the project. If we assume that we will produce 15 terawatt-hours per year, in 20 years of operation, it makes 300 terawatt-hours. At a price of €17.6 billion for the two reactors, a price of close to €60/MWh [megawatt-hour] would result, but this is only the investment. Fuel costs and much more are not included. The price for power cannot be below €100–125.”
He added that cost overruns could push the completed cost of the twin reactors well past the estimated price of €17.6 billion which is €3.6 billion more than the estimate from the number from the energy minsitry. However, of the hypothetical price of $6,500/Kw, a global benchmark, is used, the price of the two reactors, at €14.95 billion comes out much closer to the Energy Ministry’s number.
At the signing ceremony Bulgarian Prime Minister Dimitar Glavchev, Bulgarian Minister of Energy Vladimir Malinov, U.S. Ambassador to Bulgaria Kenneth Merten, Executive Director of Kozloduy NPP – New Build Petyo Ivanov, Senior Vice President of Westinghouse Energy Systems Elias Gedeon, and Hyundai Engineering & Construction President and CEO Yoon Young-Joon attended the signing ceremony in Sofia.
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Great British Nuclear Issues ‘Invitation To Negotiate’ To Four SMR Companies
- A final decision on potential technologies is expected in spring 2025
(NucNet contributed to this report) Great British Nuclear (GBN) has issued an “invitation to negotiate” to the four companies that were chosen for the shortlist of the UK government’s small modular reactor (SMR) selection process.
GBN, the public body set up to drive the delivery of new nuclear energy projects in the UK, said that after these negotiations are concluded, the companies will be invited to submit final tenders, which GBN will then evaluate.
A final decision on which technologies to select will be taken in the spring 2025. GBN has not indicated how much government funding for the first-of-a-kind (FOAK) SMR will be provided or whether it will commit to funding SMRs in “fleet mode” once the FOAK is in revenue service.
Given that none of the four contenders have completed the UK Office of Nuclear Regulation Generic Design Assessment process to license their designs, a timeline for any of the SMR to complete all key milestones and attain being in revenue service extends at least to the end of this decade or into the early 2030s.
For instance, the Generic Design Assessment (GDA) for Rolls-Royce’s Small Modular Reactor (SMR) began in 2022 and is projected to span approximately 53 months, aiming for completion in 2026. In a flurry of marketing promises, Rolls-Royce earlier had projected a two-year turnaround. The British bureaucracy won. Construction of the first unit could take three-to-four years.
The good news for Rolls-Royce and its customers is that the firm is planning to build a fleet of 16 of its 470 MWe PWRs which means it is possible the units 5-16 will benefit from factory production economies of scale, a mature supply chain, and experienced workforce.
The other three contenders will have timelines that complete with reactors in revenue service at later dates. Assuming the UK government doesn’t put all its eggs in one basket, at least one more and possibly two of the remaining contenders could create SMR fleets based on their designs.
Current Contenders
The four companies in the process are GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy International, Holtec Britain Ltd, Rolls Royce SMR Ltd and Westinghouse Electric Company UK.
The two companies that were on an initial list of six, but were not included in the list of four, were EDF and US-based NuScale Power.
French state-owned utility and nuclear operator EDF said in July that it had pulled out of the competition after deciding to shift away from its indigenous Nuward technology to a design based on proven light water reactor technology.
The UK government gave no reason for NuScale’s failure to make the list of four. In November 2023, NuScale cancelled its first SMR project, in the US, as costs increased due to inflation.
UK Nuclear Industry Calls For No More Delays
Tom Greatrex, chief executive of the London-based Nuclear Industry Association, said that while it is good to see the UK SMR competition reach this stage, what is critical is reaching a decision as soon as possible without any further delays to the now published timeline.
“Confidence in the UK government’s pronouncements on support for SMRs rests on fulfilling commitments made today. It is vital for supply chain confidence as well as driving the wider nuclear ambition.”
Greatrex’s comments reflect the deep frustration the nuclear industry has with the UK government which has repeatedly dithered and delayed its investments decisions in SMRs since first entertaining the concept of SMRs in 2015.
Greatrex called for the government to empower GBN to buy more sites, starting with Heysham, so “we can deliver a fleet of SMRs for clean, reliable, British power and good, skilled jobs.”
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Texas A&M University Proposes Sites for Reactor Test Beds
Up to now several SMR and microreactor developers have set their sights on building their test prototypes and first of a kind (FOAK) plants at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory.
A new opportunity for siting and construction next generation nuclear reactors may become available. This is due to an action by the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents.
It notified the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) it has potential sites available at Texas A&M-RELLIS in Bryan, TX, for multiple companies to test and construct the next generation of nuclear reactors. The “test bed” is expected to lead to energy advancements that could provide power to data centers for artificial intelligence and other power-hungry ventures.
The type of reactors that could be tested at Texas A&M-RELLIS are often labeled as “small modular reactors,” or SMRs. They have a footprint that is much smaller than the size of a traditional reactor, and they can produce up to 300MWe per unit, compared with more than 1,000MWe per unit with traditional reactors.
Clarity Needed on Roles, Responsibilities, and Costs of Licensing
In its press statement, Texas A&M said the submission of the letter of intent to the NRC “marks the beginning of a licensing process for the A&M System. Reactor companies will benefit from the A&M System taking on the licensing burden. The result will be a shorter path to getting their reactors up and running.”
It isn’t clear from the press statement what that means as licensing an SMR or a microreactor is an expensive and time consuming undertaking even with recent legislation mandating quicker turnaround times for the process. If the reactors built at the test bed at A&M are expected to eventually produce power, they would have to be licensed under NRC’s Part 52 regulations. The NRC is still at the front end of developing regulations for licensing advanced reactors, the so-called “Part 53 regulations.”
Even just the process of site characterization, e.g., readiness to host an advanced reactor test prototype, would require the NRC’s approval possibly through the early site permit process (ESP). In 2022 the State of Kentucky looked into the idea of preparing generic early site permits as a way to encourage siting of one or more LWRs in the state. The timeline was up to five years and the cost in 2022 was approximately $75 million per ESP. The report concluded that as the State of Kentucky had no prior experience licensing a nuclear reactor, either through an ESP, Part 50, or Part 52, that the timeline would be longer and the costs would be higher.
Image: Kentucky State Government
Lining Up Client Firms for the Program
The Texas A&M press statement says the university recently concluded the process of gathering proposals from nuclear reactor companies that hope to construct reactors at Texas A&M-RELLIS. The university did not name any of the current contenders.
Negotiations related to these proposals are expected to begin soon. Also, there might be additional opportunities for organizations to take advantage of the A&M System’s site for nuclear reactor technology testing and the manufacturing of small modular reactors.
After negotiations are complete, the A&M System will announce which companies will conduct testing and other work at Texas A&M-RELLIS. A timeline for announcing awards was not proved by the university.
Texas Size Ambitions for the Program
John Sharp, chancellor of the Texas A&M System, said “no other entity in the U.S. is further along than the Texas A&M System to provide a location and human resources to get small, modular nuclear reactors online. The test bed for the reactors will support multiple reactors from various companies.”
Sharp also claimed that the Texas A&M System, along with Texas A&M University, is uniquely qualified to take on a venture as ambitious as building, testing and running nuclear reactors. The system’s flagship campus in College Station – just a few miles from the testbed – employs dozens of professors and researchers with nuclear expertise. Plus, Texas A&M University is home to the largest nuclear engineering department of any university in the country.
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World Economic Forum Publishes Framework for Advanced Nuclear Power
(WNN) The World Economic Forum (WEF) has released a framework to help align stakeholders on key actions and strategies to accelerate deployment of small modular reactors and other advanced nuclear technologies.
The report highlights nine priority areas and actions for accelerating the deployment of these technologies. ( full text PDF file )
Image: WEF
The World Economic Forum (WEF), in collaboration with Accenture, has partnered with stakeholders across the nuclear ecosystem – including experts from large energy-consuming industries, financiers, reactor vendors, supply chain businesses, utilities, government organizations, non-profits/NGOs and academia – to develop a Collaborative Framework for Accelerating Advanced Nuclear and Small Modular Reactor Deployment. It is intended to be a coordination tool for stakeholders to align on actions and strategies to accelerate advanced nuclear and SMR deployment.
“The Framework provides a basis for locally led implementation, as priorities will vary across geographies at various stages of nuclear development,” the report says. “It could also apply to other advanced clean energy technologies that require a systemic approach to unlock progress, such as geothermal and long-duration energy storage.”
“The ecosystem for new nuclear comprises a range of stakeholders including technology developers, financial institutions, utilities, large energy consumers and governments. Reaching commercial viability of advanced nuclear and SMRs is dependent on de-risking and improving the economics of projects through purposeful, coordinated action between these stakeholders – beyond anything seen before.”
Regarding the emergence of the advanced nuclear and SMR market, WEF says ecosystem collaboration must facilitate stronger demand signals to stimulate confidence among public and private investors by sharing risks and costs.
Deployment depends on energy policies that address specific challenges, such as improving supply chain stability and creating vehicles for strategic partnerships across ecosystem stakeholders. In addition, regulation needs to be modernised by aligning regulatory bodies to streamline licensing of standard design across countries.
In order to deliver advanced nuclear and SMRs at scale, project deployment must be transformed to enhance rapid delivery of cost-competitive projects through innovative deployment models, modular construction and design for manufacture and assembly, the report says.
Where possible, existing infrastructure should be repurposed and new reactors co-located with current energy systems.
The maturity and scalability of advanced nuclear and SMR technologies should be increased by collaborating with regulators and energy off-takers, as well as by standardizing design.
The nuclear supply chain should also be prepared for large-scale deployment by boosting investment, developing nuclear fuel sources and standardizing components.
Meanwhile, the workforce should be developed by identifying skills gaps, retraining workers from other energy industries, facilitating skills pools and partnerships between industry and educational institutions.
WEF says the financing of advanced nuclear and SMRs needs to be addressed by developing innovative financing mechanisms, leveraging public-private partnerships, reaching target cost levels to attract mainstream investments, and including nuclear in clean investment taxonomies.
The report said small modular reactors (SMRs) and other advanced nuclear technologies represent clean energy solutions that, when built at scale, could deliver cost-effective carbon-free energy. These technologies are well suited to meet many clean power, heat and clean fuel production use cases for heavy industry, data centers and transport,” the report says. “However, the commercial viability of these technologies needs to be improved.
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IAEA Highlights ‘Pressing Need’ For International Finance For Nuclear Plants
- As climate summit approaches in Azerbaijan, UN atomic agency calls for investment to ‘rapidly increase’
(NucNet) As more than 100 heads of state and government are expected to gather in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, for the Cop29 UN climate summit, the International Atomic Energy Agency is hoping that delegates will agree on the pressing need for increased climate finance, including for new nuclear power plants.
As the world grapples with the escalating impacts of climate change, IAEA director-general Rafael Grossi will join global leaders at Cop29 – formally known as the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – to highlight what he called “the vast potential” of nuclear solutions for climate change mitigation, adaptation and monitoring.
The IAEA said a central theme of Cop29 will be the pressing need for increased climate finance.
A UN report released last month indicates that current policies and investments fall far short of what is needed to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C in this century, the target of the Paris Agreement signed at Cop21 in 2016.
In its own report last month the IAEA said investment in nuclear power must rapidly increase to $125 billion (€115bn) a year by 2030 meet global climate targets.
The IAEA said it will showcase nuclear solutions for climate action in some 40 events at Cop29, which will take place from the 11th to 22nd of November. The agency’s Atoms4Climate pavilion will feature an exhibit on nuclear applications, with IAEA experts ready to answer questions about how nuclear energy contributes to net-zero emissions and how nuclear science can address climate-related challenges to food security, water resources and ocean health.
The agency wants Cop29 to build on the global consensus that emerged at Cop28 in Dubai, where 22 countries signed a pledge to triple nuclear generation capacity by 2050 from a base year of 2020. Also at Cop28, the agreed deal recognised the need to accelerate nuclear energy as a key approach for a deep, rapid and sustained reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Cop29 also follows on the first Nuclear Energy Summit, hosted in Brussels by the IAEA and the government of Belgium in March, where leaders from more than 30 countries reaffirmed their commitment to nuclear energy as a way to reduce carbon emissions and meet development goals.
“At Cop28, the world agreed nuclear power must be part of the transition to net zero,” said Grossi. “We know investment in nuclear power can lower grid costs and speed up the deployment of intermittent clean-energy sources like wind and solar.
“As the world moves from consensus to construction, the IAEA supports newcomer countries in establishing safe, secure, safeguarded and sustainable nuclear power programs.”
Grossi will co-host a high-level event with the US on small modular reactors (SMRs), which offer flexible, cost-effective options for powering small energy grids, making them suitable for developing countries, as well as energy-intensive industries, data centers and even commercial ships.
Governments Need To Play A Role
The IAEA wants governments to play a role in ensuring financing availability for nuclear power projects. This includes providing loan guarantees, subsidies, and regulatory support to attract private investors. Public-private partnerships are seen as a potential model for distributing financial risks while making nuclear energy projects more bankable.
Despite private investors having been “historically averse” to nuclear energy projects due to their specific risks, various financial instruments can help mitigate these risks and make nuclear ventures more appealing to private capital.
Government backing can also come though export credit agencies, with export credit having become increasingly important for all parties involved in nuclear energy projects, the IAEA said.
Innovative financing mechanisms, including green bonds and sustainable finance, could also be used to unlock the required capital. The inclusion of nuclear energy in sustainable investment taxonomies, such as in the European Union, is seen as a potential catalyst for drawing commercial banks into the sector.
# # #
https://neutronbytes.com/2024/11/09/oklo-clears-environmental-review-at-inl/
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🇳🇿 Fire and Emergency New Zealand (
fireandemergency.nz) #newzealand #fire #risk #ransomware #smoke #loafers #facilities #plants #warehouses #buildings #solutions #industrials #healthcare #business #management #clients #partnership #safety #market #databreach #threats #services #innovative #protection #industries #contractors #customers #firefighters #informatique -
"Rain" is a song by the English #rock band #theBeatles, released on 30 May 1966 as the #Bside of their "#PaperbackWriter" single. Both songs were recorded during the sessions for #Revolver, although neither appear on that album. "Rain" was written by #JohnLennon and credited to the #LennonMcCartney partnership. He described it as being "about people moaning about the weather all the time". The song's recording contains a slowed-down rhythm track.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkY9BEuLJk4 -
🤖 A new MIT report shows a harsh reality: 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots are failing to deliver business impact. It’s not the models themselves but the way companies try to use them. Executives often blame regulation or model quality, but the data shows the real problem is poor integration and misplaced bets. Most budgets are going into sales and marketing AI, while the biggest ROI is actually in back-office automation—cutting outsourcing costs and streamlining operations. The research also found that companies trying to build AI in-house fail far more often than those buying specialized tools and forming partnerships. Empowering line managers, not just central labs, also makes a big difference. A handful of firms are turning GenAI into growth, while the vast majority are burning time and budget. The lesson is that AI strategy isn’t about experimenting everywhere—it’s about focus, fit, and execution.
TL;DR
⚠️ 95% of pilots stall
🔐 Build in-house = high failure
🛠️ ROI strongest in back office
📈 Partnerships outperform solohttps://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/
#AI #Business #DigitalTransformation #CFO -
Curve Finance, TON drive DeFi evolution with partnerships - 2025 will be TON’s year of DeFi, and it has partnered with Curve Finance... - https://cointelegraph.com/news/ton-curve-finance-defi-2024 #decentralizedfinance #stableassetswaps #liquiditystaking #curvetechnology #deficompetition #tonblockchain #curvefinance #tondefi #defi #cfmm
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TON, Curve Finance team up on stablecoin swap initiative - The partnership introduces Curve Finance's CFMM technology to TON, optim... - https://cointelegraph.com/news/ton-foundation-curve-finance-stablecoin-swap-collaboration #decentralizedexchange #tonfoundation #michaelegorov #curvefinance #stablecoin #blockchain #stableswap #crypto #cfmm #defi
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So this is a bit niche even for enviro-nuts like me but if you're down to sign petitions, this one could use it. Tell SUNY ESF to drop their partnership with the dangerous, unproven, and disrespectful "Darling 58" genetically modified chestnut tree makers SilvaBio.
If you read "The Overstory," you may be familiar with the tale of chestnut trees in North America: afflicted by an invasive blight and then prematurely chopped down by panicking white people, to the extent that chestnut trees almost went extinct. Now this private company has been working with ESF to develop blight-resistant trees, but even though their results are poor, and even though indigenous communities of the northeast, such as the Onondaga Nation, have been urging a traditional breeding approach, and even though SilvaBio's stated intent to sell the trees for profit is in conflict with ESF's mission for "all people... to propagate them for personal or restoration use," ESF has been sticking with SilvaBio.
#trees #ChestnutTrees #Darling58 #SUNYESF #SUNY #NewYork #NYS #NYpol
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So this is a bit niche even for enviro-nuts like me but if you're down to sign petitions, this one could use it. Tell SUNY ESF to drop their partnership with the dangerous, unproven, and disrespectful "Darling 58" genetically modified chestnut tree makers SilvaBio.
If you read "The Overstory," you may be familiar with the tale of chestnut trees in North America: afflicted by an invasive blight and then prematurely chopped down by panicking white people, to the extent that chestnut trees almost went extinct. Now this private company has been working with ESF to develop blight-resistant trees, but even though their results are poor, and even though indigenous communities of the northeast, such as the Onondaga Nation, have been urging a traditional breeding approach, and even though SilvaBio's stated intent to sell the trees for profit is in conflict with ESF's mission for "all people... to propagate them for personal or restoration use," ESF has been sticking with SilvaBio.
#trees #ChestnutTrees #Darling58 #SUNYESF #SUNY #NewYork #NYS #NYpol
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So this is a bit niche even for enviro-nuts like me but if you're down to sign petitions, this one could use it. Tell SUNY ESF to drop their partnership with the dangerous, unproven, and disrespectful "Darling 58" genetically modified chestnut tree makers SilvaBio.
If you read "The Overstory," you may be familiar with the tale of chestnut trees in North America: afflicted by an invasive blight and then prematurely chopped down by panicking white people, to the extent that chestnut trees almost went extinct. Now this private company has been working with ESF to develop blight-resistant trees, but even though their results are poor, and even though indigenous communities of the northeast, such as the Onondaga Nation, have been urging a traditional breeding approach, and even though SilvaBio's stated intent to sell the trees for profit is in conflict with ESF's mission for "all people... to propagate them for personal or restoration use," ESF has been sticking with SilvaBio.
#trees #ChestnutTrees #Darling58 #SUNYESF #SUNY #NewYork #NYS #NYpol
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So this is a bit niche even for enviro-nuts like me but if you're down to sign petitions, this one could use it. Tell SUNY ESF to drop their partnership with the dangerous, unproven, and disrespectful "Darling 58" genetically modified chestnut tree makers SilvaBio.
If you read "The Overstory," you may be familiar with the tale of chestnut trees in North America: afflicted by an invasive blight and then prematurely chopped down by panicking white people, to the extent that chestnut trees almost went extinct. Now this private company has been working with ESF to develop blight-resistant trees, but even though their results are poor, and even though indigenous communities of the northeast, such as the Onondaga Nation, have been urging a traditional breeding approach, and even though SilvaBio's stated intent to sell the trees for profit is in conflict with ESF's mission for "all people... to propagate them for personal or restoration use," ESF has been sticking with SilvaBio.
#trees #ChestnutTrees #Darling58 #SUNYESF #SUNY #NewYork #NYS #NYpol
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XRP gains slightly as Ondo Finance announced that it has successfully completed the first cross-border and interbank buyback of tokenised US Treasury bonds in collaboration with ...
https://dmarketforces.com/xrp-gains-on-ondo-ripple-jpmorgan-mastercard-partnership/
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KWLOT: NEIGHBOURS WORKING TOGETHER
When people think of a library, they largely think of books. But the KW Library of Things (KWLoT), offers tents, sewing machines, mitre saws and more.
Launched as a partnership with Extend-a-Family Waterloo Region (EAFWR) in 2018 by Wilfrid Laurier University graduate student Devon Fernandes, KWLoT’s catalogue has grown from 350 items to over 1,000 available to its 350 members.
KWLoT has four membership tiers that offer different options for the number of items that can be checked out and the length of the loan. Annual memberships range from $50 for the base to $500 for the community builder membership, which covers the cost of three base memberships for other community members.
The library was started as a school project by Fernandes, a community psychology student at Laurier working under Felix Munger in the psychology department. Fernandes was researching other community-based lending libraries and was searching for a host partner when they approached the team at EAFWR.
EAFWR supports individuals with disabilities and others who face barriers by fostering connection and inclusion throughout the community. Al Mills, executive director at EAFWR, said the organization was a willing partner for the program.
Mills said the program serves three purposes for the organization; promoting a sharing economy, providing paid and volunteer opportunities for people living with disabilities and leading a mission to be environmental stewards by keeping excess waste out of landfills.
“For many of our members, we’re giving them access to things that they either don’t have the money to afford; they don’t have a space to store it, or maybe they only need it once a year,” Mills said.
The KWLoT is managed by paid staff and volunteers, many of whom are supported by EAFWR and its programs.
While the main benefit to members is reducing the need for multiple people to purchase the same items, Kim Sproul, KWLoT program manager, said that is only part of the program’s role in environmental stewardship. KWLoT offers volunteer-led repair clinics and workshops for people in the community who want to extend the life of an item, from electronics to clothing.
“We have a local beauty of a human being named Murray Zink who works with the University of Waterloo’s UWRepairHub. He started bringing his volunteers, and you don’t just drop off your items. You sit with them as they repair it, and they’ll talk you through it and ask about the item and what it means to you,” she said.
KWLoT received a grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation in 2025 to hire additional staff as it expands its catalogue and workshops. Mills said the organization is also looking for environmentally motivated partners who can help support their work to reduce waste.
As the organization enters its eighth year, Mills said they are still guided by their belief that “we’re better off together.”
“Our goal is to be a community of belonging. KWLoT is a demonstration project of what it can be like when neighbours work together and share what they have,” Mills said.
#AlexKinsella #eafwr #fostering #kwlot #library #mills #neighbours #organize #organizing #workingTogether -
KWLOT: NEIGHBOURS WORKING TOGETHER
When people think of a library, they largely think of books. But the KW Library of Things (KWLoT), offers tents, sewing machines, mitre saws and more.
Launched as a partnership with Extend-a-Family Waterloo Region (EAFWR) in 2018 by Wilfrid Laurier University graduate student Devon Fernandes, KWLoT’s catalogue has grown from 350 items to over 1,000 available to its 350 members.
KWLoT has four membership tiers that offer different options for the number of items that can be checked out and the length of the loan. Annual memberships range from $50 for the base to $500 for the community builder membership, which covers the cost of three base memberships for other community members.
The library was started as a school project by Fernandes, a community psychology student at Laurier working under Felix Munger in the psychology department. Fernandes was researching other community-based lending libraries and was searching for a host partner when they approached the team at EAFWR.
EAFWR supports individuals with disabilities and others who face barriers by fostering connection and inclusion throughout the community. Al Mills, executive director at EAFWR, said the organization was a willing partner for the program.
Mills said the program serves three purposes for the organization; promoting a sharing economy, providing paid and volunteer opportunities for people living with disabilities and leading a mission to be environmental stewards by keeping excess waste out of landfills.
“For many of our members, we’re giving them access to things that they either don’t have the money to afford; they don’t have a space to store it, or maybe they only need it once a year,” Mills said.
The KWLoT is managed by paid staff and volunteers, many of whom are supported by EAFWR and its programs.
While the main benefit to members is reducing the need for multiple people to purchase the same items, Kim Sproul, KWLoT program manager, said that is only part of the program’s role in environmental stewardship. KWLoT offers volunteer-led repair clinics and workshops for people in the community who want to extend the life of an item, from electronics to clothing.
“We have a local beauty of a human being named Murray Zink who works with the University of Waterloo’s UWRepairHub. He started bringing his volunteers, and you don’t just drop off your items. You sit with them as they repair it, and they’ll talk you through it and ask about the item and what it means to you,” she said.
KWLoT received a grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation in 2025 to hire additional staff as it expands its catalogue and workshops. Mills said the organization is also looking for environmentally motivated partners who can help support their work to reduce waste.
As the organization enters its eighth year, Mills said they are still guided by their belief that “we’re better off together.”
“Our goal is to be a community of belonging. KWLoT is a demonstration project of what it can be like when neighbours work together and share what they have,” Mills said.
#AlexKinsella #eafwr #fostering #kwlot #library #mills #neighbours #organize #organizing #workingTogether -
KWLOT: NEIGHBOURS WORKING TOGETHER
When people think of a library, they largely think of books. But the KW Library of Things (KWLoT), offers tents, sewing machines, mitre saws and more.
Launched as a partnership with Extend-a-Family Waterloo Region (EAFWR) in 2018 by Wilfrid Laurier University graduate student Devon Fernandes, KWLoT’s catalogue has grown from 350 items to over 1,000 available to its 350 members.
KWLoT has four membership tiers that offer different options for the number of items that can be checked out and the length of the loan. Annual memberships range from $50 for the base to $500 for the community builder membership, which covers the cost of three base memberships for other community members.
The library was started as a school project by Fernandes, a community psychology student at Laurier working under Felix Munger in the psychology department. Fernandes was researching other community-based lending libraries and was searching for a host partner when they approached the team at EAFWR.
EAFWR supports individuals with disabilities and others who face barriers by fostering connection and inclusion throughout the community. Al Mills, executive director at EAFWR, said the organization was a willing partner for the program.
Mills said the program serves three purposes for the organization; promoting a sharing economy, providing paid and volunteer opportunities for people living with disabilities and leading a mission to be environmental stewards by keeping excess waste out of landfills.
“For many of our members, we’re giving them access to things that they either don’t have the money to afford; they don’t have a space to store it, or maybe they only need it once a year,” Mills said.
The KWLoT is managed by paid staff and volunteers, many of whom are supported by EAFWR and its programs.
While the main benefit to members is reducing the need for multiple people to purchase the same items, Kim Sproul, KWLoT program manager, said that is only part of the program’s role in environmental stewardship. KWLoT offers volunteer-led repair clinics and workshops for people in the community who want to extend the life of an item, from electronics to clothing.
“We have a local beauty of a human being named Murray Zink who works with the University of Waterloo’s UWRepairHub. He started bringing his volunteers, and you don’t just drop off your items. You sit with them as they repair it, and they’ll talk you through it and ask about the item and what it means to you,” she said.
KWLoT received a grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation in 2025 to hire additional staff as it expands its catalogue and workshops. Mills said the organization is also looking for environmentally motivated partners who can help support their work to reduce waste.
As the organization enters its eighth year, Mills said they are still guided by their belief that “we’re better off together.”
“Our goal is to be a community of belonging. KWLoT is a demonstration project of what it can be like when neighbours work together and share what they have,” Mills said.
#AlexKinsella #eafwr #fostering #kwlot #library #mills #neighbours #organize #organizing #workingTogether -
KWLOT: NEIGHBOURS WORKING TOGETHER
When people think of a library, they largely think of books. But the KW Library of Things (KWLoT), offers tents, sewing machines, mitre saws and more.
Launched as a partnership with Extend-a-Family Waterloo Region (EAFWR) in 2018 by Wilfrid Laurier University graduate student Devon Fernandes, KWLoT’s catalogue has grown from 350 items to over 1,000 available to its 350 members.
KWLoT has four membership tiers that offer different options for the number of items that can be checked out and the length of the loan. Annual memberships range from $50 for the base to $500 for the community builder membership, which covers the cost of three base memberships for other community members.
The library was started as a school project by Fernandes, a community psychology student at Laurier working under Felix Munger in the psychology department. Fernandes was researching other community-based lending libraries and was searching for a host partner when they approached the team at EAFWR.
EAFWR supports individuals with disabilities and others who face barriers by fostering connection and inclusion throughout the community. Al Mills, executive director at EAFWR, said the organization was a willing partner for the program.
Mills said the program serves three purposes for the organization; promoting a sharing economy, providing paid and volunteer opportunities for people living with disabilities and leading a mission to be environmental stewards by keeping excess waste out of landfills.
“For many of our members, we’re giving them access to things that they either don’t have the money to afford; they don’t have a space to store it, or maybe they only need it once a year,” Mills said.
The KWLoT is managed by paid staff and volunteers, many of whom are supported by EAFWR and its programs.
While the main benefit to members is reducing the need for multiple people to purchase the same items, Kim Sproul, KWLoT program manager, said that is only part of the program’s role in environmental stewardship. KWLoT offers volunteer-led repair clinics and workshops for people in the community who want to extend the life of an item, from electronics to clothing.
“We have a local beauty of a human being named Murray Zink who works with the University of Waterloo’s UWRepairHub. He started bringing his volunteers, and you don’t just drop off your items. You sit with them as they repair it, and they’ll talk you through it and ask about the item and what it means to you,” she said.
KWLoT received a grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation in 2025 to hire additional staff as it expands its catalogue and workshops. Mills said the organization is also looking for environmentally motivated partners who can help support their work to reduce waste.
As the organization enters its eighth year, Mills said they are still guided by their belief that “we’re better off together.”
“Our goal is to be a community of belonging. KWLoT is a demonstration project of what it can be like when neighbours work together and share what they have,” Mills said.
#AlexKinsella #eafwr #fostering #kwlot #library #mills #neighbours #organize #organizing #workingTogether -
The Zeroing of Knowledge: When Everything Is Known, What Remains Worth Learning?
Knowledge used to be expensive. It cost years of apprenticeship, tuition in the tens of thousands, decades of practice, and, more than anything, the brutal currency of time. A physician spent twelve years beyond high school before being trusted to cut into a human body. A lawyer spent seven years and a bar exam before being permitted to argue before a judge. A professor spent a decade accumulating the credentials required to stand before a lecture hall and declare, with institutional authority, that they knew something you did not. The entire architecture of Western professional life was built on a single economic premise: knowledge is scarce, therefore knowledge is valuable, therefore the people who possess knowledge deserve premium compensation for granting access to it. That premise is now dead. It did not die slowly. It was killed in roughly three years, and we are only beginning to understand the corpse.
The arrival of large language models, and the swift trajectory toward artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence, has not merely disrupted the knowledge economy. It has annihilated the foundational scarcity upon which that economy depended.
When a high school student in rural Nebraska can query a system that synthesizes the totality of published medical literature in four seconds and receive a differential diagnosis that rivals or exceeds what a third-year resident could produce, the twelve years of medical training are no longer a gate. They are a relic.
When a landlord in Queens can receive a lease analysis that accounts for New York tenant law, recent appellate decisions, and municipal code changes without paying a $400-per-hour attorney, the seven years of legal education are no longer a credential. They are an artifact.
When a curious fourteen-year-old in Bangalore can access, for free, an explanation of quantum chromodynamics that is more lucid and more patient than anything offered in the average university physics department, the entire notion of the lecture hall as a site of knowledge transmission becomes not merely outdated but faintly absurd.
This is not a gentle transition. This is the collapse of a pricing model that sustained the Western middle class for a century and a half. The professional class, that broad stratum of lawyers and doctors and accountants and engineers and professors who built comfortable suburban lives on the premise that their education entitled them to earnings well above the median, derived their economic power from one thing: they knew what you did not, and you needed what they knew. Strip away that asymmetry and you strip away their market position. You do not reform the university. You do not modernize the law firm. You remove the reason they existed in that form at all.
· · ·
Consider the university, because it is the clearest case and the most emotionally fraught. The modern American university is, at its operational core, a knowledge-delivery system. Yes, there are laboratories and athletic programs and residential life offices and study-abroad coordinators, but the central commercial transaction is this: a student pays tuition, and in exchange, a credentialed expert delivers knowledge in structured increments over four years, at the end of which a piece of paper certifies that the student has absorbed a sufficient quantity of that knowledge to merit professional entry. The entire apparatus, the syllabi, the midterms, the lecture halls, the grading rubrics, the office hours, the tenure system, is designed to manage the controlled release of knowledge from those who have it to those who need it.
What happens when the student already has it? Not because she studied in advance, but because the knowledge itself is ambient, omnipresent, instantly retrievable, and free? The transaction collapses. The student is no longer paying for access to knowledge. She can get that from her phone on the bus. She is paying, if she is paying at all, for something else entirely: for the social experience, for the credential, for the network, for the four-year deferral of adult responsibility, for the right to say “I went to Michigan.” These are real goods, but they are not the goods the university was designed to provide, and the price of a four-year residential credential in the United States currently runs between $120,000 and $320,000. That is a staggering price to pay for a social experience and a line on a resume when the actual knowledge can be acquired at no cost in a fraction of the time.
The university will not vanish. Institutions with endowments in the billions do not disappear; they adapt, however slowly and however badly. But the adaptation will be wrenching. The first casualties will be the mid-tier private colleges that lack both the prestige of the Ivy League and the public funding of state systems. They survive on a value proposition that says “we deliver a quality education,” and when that education is freely available elsewhere, the proposition collapses. The liberal arts college that charges $62,000 per year to offer courses in philosophy, history, and literature, subjects where the knowledge is textual and therefore most immediately replicable by language models, faces an existential question it cannot answer with a new marketing campaign. The second casualties will be the graduate programs, particularly the professional schools. If the knowledge component of a law degree or an MBA can be compressed from three years to three months of guided interaction with a superintelligent system, the three-year program exists only as a hazing ritual and a networking event. That is a difficult case to make at $70,000 per year.
· · ·
The law firm faces its own reckoning, and the reckoning is already underway, though it is being disguised as “efficiency gains” and “technology integration.” The traditional law firm operates on a leveraged model: a small number of senior partners possess deep expertise, and a large number of junior associates perform the knowledge-intensive grunt work of legal research, document review, brief drafting, and contract analysis. The associates are paid well because they traded years of education and exam preparation for the ability to perform this work. The partners are paid extraordinarily well because they supervise the associates and maintain the client relationships that generate the fees. When the grunt work can be performed instantaneously and at near-zero cost by a system that has ingested the entirety of case law, the associate layer evaporates. Not thins. Evaporates. And when the associate layer evaporates, the leverage model that generates partner income evaporates with it. The partners retain their client relationships and their courtroom presence and their judgment, but they lose the economic engine that multiplied their value. A law firm of 500 becomes a law firm of 50. The other 450 are not retrained. They are gone.
The doctor’s office tells a different story, but the ending is similar. Medicine is partly a knowledge discipline and partly a manual discipline. A surgeon’s hands cannot be replaced by a language model, and the physical examination, the palpation of an abdomen, the auscultation of a heart murmur, the visual assessment of a wound, remains tied to the human body in ways that resist full digitization. But the diagnostic function, the part of medicine that involves taking a constellation of symptoms and matching them to a disease, is a pattern-recognition task, and pattern recognition is precisely what these systems do better than any individual human. The general practitioner who spends fifteen minutes asking questions and then orders a battery of tests is performing a workflow that can be replicated in seconds with greater accuracy and broader differential consideration. The specialist who reads imaging and identifies pathology is competing against systems that already outperform radiologists in multiple peer-reviewed studies. The knowledge component of medicine, the years of memorizing pharmacology and pathophysiology and clinical protocols, is the component most vulnerable to replacement. What remains is the procedural skill, the bedside manner, the ethical judgment in difficult cases, and the human willingness to be present with another human in suffering. These are not trivial. But they are not what medical school primarily teaches, and they are not what the billing codes primarily reimburse.
· · ·
Now we arrive at the harder question, the one that does not concern institutions but concerns the self. For most of modern Western history, knowledge has been the primary currency of personal identity among the educated class. “I know things you do not know” is the unstated foundation of professional pride, intellectual confidence, and social standing. The doctor at the dinner party is deferred to on medical questions. The lawyer at the family gathering is consulted on legal matters. The professor at the conference is respected for the depth and specificity of their scholarly command. These are not merely economic positions. They are identity positions. They answer the question “Who am I?” with the answer “I am someone who knows.”
When everyone has access to the same infinite reservoir of knowledge, that answer loses its force. You are not special because you know the mechanism of action of metformin. The machine knows it too, and knows it better, and knows the fourteen drug interactions your residency program never covered. You are not special because you can recite the holding in Marbury v. Madison. The machine can do that and trace the subsequent two centuries of judicial interpretation in the time it takes you to clear your throat. You are not special because you have read all of Proust. The machine has read all of Proust in every language Proust has been translated into and can cross-reference his treatment of involuntary memory with neuroscientific research on hippocampal consolidation that did not exist when you wrote your dissertation. The ego that was built on knowing is an ego built on sand, and the tide has come in.
This is genuinely terrifying for many people, and it should be acknowledged as such rather than waved away with platitudes about “human creativity” and “emotional intelligence.” The professional who spent a decade acquiring expertise is now being told, in effect, that the acquisition was unnecessary. Not that it was wasted, exactly, but that the competitive advantage it conferred has been zeroed out. That is a psychological wound, not merely an economic one. It strikes at the center of how a person understands their own worth. And the standard responses, “But you still have judgment!” and “But you still have empathy!”, are inadequate, because they ask the professional to rebuild an entire identity around capacities they were never trained to value as primary. The surgeon was not trained to think of bedside manner as the core of their professional identity. The lawyer was not trained to think of ethical discernment as the thing that justifies their fees. The professor was not trained to think of mentorship as the reason the university exists. These capacities were treated as secondary, as the soft skills that accompanied the hard knowledge. Now the hard knowledge is free, and the soft skills are the only thing left, and nobody quite knows how to price them.
· · ·
Where, then, does pride belong? It migrates. It moves from knowing to doing, from possession to application, from recall to synthesis. The question is no longer “What do you know?” but “What can you do with what everything now knows?” This is a different kind of competence, and it rewards different kinds of people. The person who thrives in the post-knowledge economy is not the one with the best memory or the most degrees or the deepest command of a single discipline. It is the person who can formulate the right question, who can recognize when a machine’s output is subtly wrong, who can synthesize across domains that the machine treats as separate, who can make the judgment call that requires not just information but wisdom, and wisdom is the one thing that cannot be commoditized because it is not knowledge at all. It is the residue of lived experience applied to novel situations, and no system, however vast its training data, has lived.
This is the genuine ground of human distinction going forward, and it is worth being specific about what it includes. It includes taste, the ability to discern quality that cannot be reduced to metrics. It includes moral reasoning, the capacity to weigh competing goods and arrive at a defensible position when the facts alone do not determine the answer. It includes narrative judgment, the understanding of what story needs to be told and why and to whom and in what order. It includes physical skill, the coordination of hand and eye and body that produces surgery, sculpture, athletics, and craft. It includes relational intelligence, the capacity to sit with another person in complexity and offer not information but presence. None of these are knowledge. All of them are valuable. And all of them have been systematically undervalued by institutions that organized themselves around knowledge as the primary good.
· · ·
I taught a class once called “Ways of Knowing.” It was, at its heart, an epistemology course disguised as cultural studies. We examined the various channels through which human beings come to believe they know things: formal education, community transmission, religious doctrine, mythological narrative, scientific method, lived experience, and, yes, memes, those compressed cultural units that carry meaning across populations at speeds that formal education cannot match. The course asked students to interrogate not just what they knew but how they knew it, and to recognize that the method of knowing shaped the knowledge itself. What you learn in a laboratory is different from what you learn in a church, not because one is true and the other false, but because the epistemological framework determines what counts as evidence, what counts as authority, and what counts as proof.
If I were to teach that class twenty-five years from now, in 2051, the syllabus would need to be rebuilt from the foundation. The old “ways of knowing” presumed that knowledge was acquired, that it took effort and time and method, that different methods produced different kinds of knowledge, and that the student’s task was to understand the strengths and limitations of each method. In a world of AGI or ASI, knowledge is not acquired. It is accessed. The effort is zero. The time is zero. The method is a query. The interesting question is no longer “How do you come to know this?” but rather “Now that you know everything, what do you do with it? How do you evaluate it? How do you detect when the system that provides it is wrong, biased, or incomplete? How do you maintain intellectual autonomy when the most convenient source of information is also the most persuasive and the least transparent about its own limitations?”
The 2051 version of “Ways of Knowing” would be a course in epistemic self-defense. It would teach students not how to acquire knowledge but how to resist the passive acceptance of knowledge that arrives fully formed and without friction. It would examine the psychology of deference, the human tendency to trust an authority that is always available, always confident, and never visibly tired or distracted or emotionally compromised. It would study the history of oracles, not as quaint mythology but as a direct analogue to the current moment: societies that outsource their knowing to a singular source eventually lose the capacity to evaluate what that source tells them. It would ask, with genuine urgency, what happens to critical thinking when thinking itself feels unnecessary, when the answer arrives before the question has finished forming, when the student’s experience of intellectual struggle, that productive discomfort of not-yet-knowing, is eliminated entirely.
The course would also need to grapple with a new epistemological category that did not exist when I first taught it: machine-generated knowledge. Not knowledge that a human discovered and a machine stored, but knowledge that a machine produced, patterns identified in data sets too large for any human to review, correlations extracted from domains that no human researcher had thought to combine, predictions generated by processes that even the system’s designers cannot fully explain. This is knowledge without a knower, insight without an intellect, and it challenges every epistemological framework that Western philosophy has produced since Plato. If no human being understands why the system believes what it believes, and yet the system’s beliefs prove correct with disturbing regularity, what does it mean to “know” something? Is the human who reads the machine’s output and acts on it a knower, or a follower? Is the machine a knower, or merely a process? These are not parlor games. They are the foundational questions of a civilization that has handed its epistemological authority to systems it cannot audit.
· · ·
Is knowledge obsolete? No. That is the wrong word. Knowledge is not obsolete in the way that the telegraph is obsolete. Knowledge still functions. It is still necessary as the substrate upon which judgment and wisdom and action operate. You cannot exercise medical judgment without medical knowledge; you simply no longer need to carry that knowledge in your own neurons. What is obsolete is the scarcity of knowledge, and with it, the entire economic and social and psychological infrastructure that was built on that scarcity. The university as knowledge-delivery mechanism is obsolete. The law firm as knowledge-brokerage is obsolete. The doctor’s office as diagnostic-knowledge-for-hire is obsolete. The ego that defines itself by what it knows is obsolete. The pride that derives from possessing what others lack is obsolete, at least insofar as the possession in question is informational.
What replaces these things is not yet clear, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling something. But the direction is visible. The university that survives will be a place that teaches not knowledge but discernment: how to evaluate, how to judge, how to synthesize, how to create, how to act ethically in conditions of radical uncertainty. The law firm that survives will be a small partnership of strategic counselors who bring not legal knowledge but legal wisdom, the understanding of how law operates in the mess of human life that no statute fully anticipates. The doctor’s office that survives will be a place of human encounter, where the value is not the diagnosis (the machine already provided that) but the conversation about what the diagnosis means for this particular person in this particular life with these particular fears and obligations. The self that survives will be a self defined not by what it contains but by what it does, not by the knowledge it has accumulated but by the judgment it exercises, the care it extends, the beauty it creates, the courage it musters when the machine says one thing and conscience says another.
The zeroing of knowledge is not the end of human value. It is the end of a particular, historically contingent, deeply entrenched model of human value that equated worth with information. That model served us well when information was hard to come by. It produced great universities, great libraries, great professional traditions, and a broad middle class that lived comfortably on the sale of expertise. But the conditions that produced it are gone, and they are not coming back, and the sooner we stop pretending that the old model can be patched or updated or supplemented with a few online courses and a chatbot, the sooner we can begin the difficult, necessary, genuinely creative work of building something new. Something that values wisdom over knowledge, doing over knowing, presence over information, and the irreducible strangeness of being human in a world where the machines have read all the books.
#agi #ai #aristotle #asi #intelligence #knowledge #law #learning #medicine #school #students #teaching #tech #university #waysOfKnowing -
https://www.wacoca.com/news/2510585/ 豊田織機の非公開化報道、トヨタ「一部出資含め様々な可能性検討」 | ロイター #Asia #ASXPAC #AUT #Auto... #BACT #Biz #Business #BusinessNews #CARM #CARM1 #CMPNY #CYCS #CYCS08 #DEAL1 #DEST:NOJPBSM #DEST:NOJPTPM #DEST:NOJPZTM #EASIA #HMAC #HMAC1 #INDG #INDG08 #INDM #INDS #INDS08 #JDOM #JLN #jp #LIST1 #MACH #MACH08 #MEVN #mrg #PUBL #RATI:PARTNERSHIPSMA #ビジネス
