Japan becomes the first country in the world to begin mining rare earth metals from the ocean floor
Tokyo has launched a test mission to extract rare earth elements from a depth of around 6 kilometres. A specialised vessel operates like a giant vacuum cleaner — loosening the seabed and pumping sediment containing valuable materials through a pipe using powerful pumps. The goal is blunt and strategic: to get off China’s hook. According to estimates, one tonne of seabed sediment contains at least 2 kilograms of rare earth metals — critically important for electronics, electric vehicles, and defence industries.
“The link between lack of sleep and cancer is now so strong that the World Health Organization has classified any form of nighttime shift work as a probable carcinogen." pic.twitter.com/179qEbw6OM
Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images
Back in December, Elon Musk’s pet chatbot Grok made headlines for casually distributing the private addresses and phone numbers of everyday people, scraping data from public sources with unsettling ease while other AI models refused. Now, that same model is being welcomed into a far more sensitive arena.
This week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Grok will be integrated into the Pentagon’s classified systems later this month as part of a sweeping, department-wide initiative to weaponize AI.
During a speech delivered to SpaceX employees at the company’s facility in Brownsville, Texas, Hegseth said he envisions a military AI that will operate “without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications.” The Pentagon’s AI “will not be woke,” he added.
“We will not win the future by sprinkling AI onto old tactics like digital pixie dust,” Hegseth exclaimed. “We will win by discovering entirely new ways of fighting. That’s why we will run continuous experimentation campaigns, quarterly force-on-force combat labs with AI coordinated swarms, agent-based cyber defense, and distributed command and control.”
In addition to the Grok integration, Hegseth announced the creation of a new role within the Department of Defense, the “Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer,” to be filled by Cameron Stanley. Stanley was most recently the national security transformation lead at Amazon Web Services, a role he began after a lengthy career as as science and tech advisor at the Pentagon.
Musk’s Grok might be the perfect ideological match for Hegseth’s vision for the Pentagon going forward. Engineered by Musk to be an unhinged alternative to “woke” AI bots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Grok has already demonstrated a startling willingness to provide detailed instructions for unethical or illegal activities.
That alignment becomes clearer in light of the Pentagon’s recent campaigns, some of which are seen as illegal under internationallaw. Under Hegseth, the DoD has orchestrated a number of brutal attacks against sovereign nations — including a ruthless campaign of murder against Venezuela, the scorching of Nigerian villages under the pretense of counter-terrorism, and the launch of least 134 air strikes on Somalia, which have killed scores of civilians and militants alike.
A tool like Grok would be particularly useful in this context. Though other AI models have their own ethics and safety issues, a Futurism survey of chatbots including ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot and Grok found that only the latter was willing to give operational suggestions for a “hypothetical invasion of Greenland.” The rest refused, citing international law and other ethical issues.
As if the moral rot wasn’t already deep enough, the Grok initiative comes just weeks after Republican lawmaker Lisa McClain’s husband purchased somewhere between $100,001 and $250,000 in xAI stock — the company behind Grok. The stock purchase, reported by Sludge, came just days after McClain met with Trump for a December 3rd White House event, and is yet another dubious stain on the administration’s track record with insider information.
I’m a tech and transit correspondent for Futurism, where my beat includes transportation, infrastructure, and the role of emerging technologies in governance, surveillance, and labor.
Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images
At this point, tech corporations have made it no secret that their end goal is to replace all jobs with AI — thus cementing themselves as indispensable to the world economy. But what happens if we actually get to that point?
Either they don’t have a clue, or they don’t want to say.
Speaking at a press conference last month, Geoffrey Hinton — a pioneer in the field of neural networks, the bedrock of modern AI — remarked that “it’s clear that a lot of jobs are going to disappear: it’s not clear that it’s going to create a lot of jobs to replace that.”
Often lauded as a “godfather of AI,” Hinton has gone on the record many times to warn about the social cost of AI solutionism in an economic system driven by profit. “This isn’t AI’s problem,” he continued last month. “This is our political system’s problem. If you get a massive increase in productivity, how does that wealth get shared around?”
It’s a critically important question as AI spending becomes integral to the US economy, yet one which tech corporations and the moguls heading them have been at a loss to answer.
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, for example, has waxed poetic about a future in which AI and robotics could make us all rich. Currently the world’s wealthiest person himself, Musk has spent some time over the last few weeks bleating about “universal high income,”a take on universal basic income where every out-of-work peon would live comfortably off the prosperity of private corporations, like his beleaguered AI venture, xAI.
Of course, as The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy observes, such material abundance for displaced workers won’t be possible unless Musk and his fellow billionaires agree to share their largesse. (As Martin Luther King Jr wrote from Birmingham Jail, “it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.”)
OpenAI’s Sam Altman has echoed Musk’s ideas, saying he hopes AI can bring about what he calls “universal extreme wealth,” in which everyone basically has ownership stakes in every AI company.
Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and CEO of Microsoft AI, has called AI a “fundamentally labor-replacing tool,” which is evidently worth the mass economic turmoil, because “in 15 or 20 years’ time, we will be producing new scientific, cultural knowledge at almost zero marginal cost.”
Overall, it’s hard to see this scenario coming to pass. Currently, Goldman Sachs only predicts a 7 percent increase in global GDP over the next ten years due to AI, while the Penn Wharton Budget Model foresees a 3.7 percent boost to GDP by 2075.
Any AI-driven bump in GDP would undoubtedly be a boost — but far from the one needed to avoid widespread poverty and anguish without major concessions from the billionaire class. But hey, if they’re serious about it, there’s never been a better time for them to put their money where their mouth is.
I’m a tech and transit correspondent for Futurism, where my beat includes transportation, infrastructure, and the role of emerging technologies in governance, surveillance, and labor.
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