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There’s a price shocker coming at the pumps.
Elon Musk isn’t content with electric cars, shooting people into orbit, populating Mars and building underground tunnels to solve traffic problems. He also wants to get inside your brain.
His startup, Neuralink, wants to one day implant computer chips inside the human brain. The goal is to develop implants that can treat neural disorders — and that may one day be powerful enough to put humanity on a more even footing with possible future superintelligent computers.
Not that it’s anywhere close to that yet.
In a video demonstration Friday explicitly aimed at recruiting new employees, Musk showed off a prototype of the device. About the size of a large coin, it’s designed to be implanted in a person’s skull. Ultra-thin wires hanging form the device would go directly into the brain. An earlier version of the device would have been placed behind an ear like a hearing aid.
But the startup is far from a having commercial product, which would involve complex human trials and FDA approval among many other things. Friday’s demonstration featured three pigs. One, named Gertrude, had a Neuralink implant.
Musk, a founder of both the electric car company Tesla Motors and the private space-exploration firm SpaceX, has become an outspoken doomsayer about the threat artificial intelligence might one day pose to the human race. Continued growth in AI cognitive capabilities, he and like-minded critics suggest, could lead to machines that can outthink and outmanoeuvr humans with whom they might have little in common. The proposed solution? Link computers to our brains so we can keep up.
Musk urged coders, engineers and especially people with experience having “shipped” (that is, actually created) a product to apply. “You don’t need to have brain experience,” he said, adding that this is something that can be learned on the job.
Hooking a brain up directly to electronics is not new. Doctors implant electrodes in brains to deliver stimulation for treating such conditions as Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and chronic pain. In experiments, implanted sensors have let paralyzed people use brain signals to operate computers and move robotic arms. In 2016, researchers reported that a man regained some movement in his own hand with a brain implant.
But Musk’s proposal goes beyond this. Neuralink wants to build on those existing medical treatments as well as one day work on surgeries that could improve cognitive functioning, according to a Wall Street Journal article on the company’s launch.
While there are endless, outlandish applications to brain-computer interfaces — gaming, or as someone on Twitter asked Musk, summoning your Tesla — Neuralink wants to first use the device with people who have severe spinal cord injury to help them talk, type and move using their brain waves.
“I am confident that long term it would be possible to restore someone’s full-body motion,” said Musk, who’s also famously said that he wants to “die on Mars, just not on impact.”
Neuralink is not the only company working on artificial intelligence for the brain. Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who sold his previous payments startup Braintree to PayPal for US$800 million, started Kernel, a company working on “advanced neural interfaces” to treat disease and extend cognition, in 2016. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also interested in the space. Facebook bought CTRL-labs, a startup developing non-invasive neural interfaces, in 2019 and folded it into Facebook’s Reality Labs, whose goal is to “fundamentally transform the way we interact with devices.”
That might be an easier sell than the Neuralink device, which would require recipients to agree to have the device implanted in their brain, possibly by a robot surgeon. Neuralink did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.
Premier Doug Ford lashed out at the gas companies for the double-digit overnight increase in the price of gas across the GTA, calling it unacceptable and disgusting.
Speaking at an unrelated announcement in Oakville, Ont., on Thursday, Ford took a moment to vent on behalf of “16 million people” across the province.
“You go out last night and you’re sitting there for 20 minutes in the lineup to get gas. It’s unacceptable,” said Ford. “Everywhere I was going it was a $1.59. You wake up this morning and it’s $1.80. It’s absolutely disgusting.”
Prices at the pumps surged 14 cents overnight to 178.9 cents/litre at most GTA stations. Analysts attribute the increase to the annual changeover from winter gas to summer gas.
“That is why prices are going up so significantly all at once is essentially we’re seeing discounts on winter gasoline to get rid of it but now that we’ve made the jump, summer gasoline inventories are much lower and thus a much higher price,” Patrick De Haan, the head of petroleum analysis at Gas Buddy tells CityNews.
That explanation, Ford said, was simply a way for the gas companies to gouge people.
“It’s absolutely disgusting what the oil companies are doing,” said an agitated Ford as he questioned whether the gas companies are waiting for the tanks to drain at gas stations before filling them up with the new summer formulation. “Or are you using the old gas and charging the higher cost.”
“I have my opinion that it’s not physically possible to drain every single gas station to put the fresh stuff in. So either you’re putting the fresh stuff in last month or you’re gouging the people right now.”
Ford went on to say that after consulting with some friends in the United States, he found that gas prices were trending around $3.80 per gallon. “Folks, let’s do the math – it’s a $1.80 (a litre) that’s $7.20 (a US gallon).”
Mike Eppel, 680 News Radio Toronto Senior Business Editor, says it also comes down to a refining capacity issue in this country.
“So there’s lots of oil, that’s not the issue – oil supplies are high. It’s the refining capacity. We haven’t had a refinery built in eastern Canada since whenever – you can’t get a pipeline built. And anytime there is any disruption in the system, up goes the price for gas.”
Ford did not limit his anger on rising gas prices to just the oil companies, closing his rant by taking a shot at the federal government’s carbon tax, which took effect on April 1 and pushed gas prices up three cents a litre.
“This goes back to the federal government sticking their hands in the people’s pockets, they don’t care that we have some of the highest prices in North America on the carbon tax, they jack it up 17.5 per cent,” explained Ford. “And then of course the oil companies thought they’d hop on board, no one’s going to notice, because if I remember … just a few months ago I remember filling up for $1.30 to $1.34. Did the barrel of oil go up 30 per cent? The answer is no. So where is the 30 per cent.”
While the price of gas is expected to fall by four cents/litre on Friday, prices will continue to fluctuate with no real relief in sight until June or July.
Google has fired 28 employees after a number of staffers protested the company’s cloud contract with the Israeli government.
The workers were terminated after staging protests inside Google’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, per CNN.
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In a statement, Google’s parent company Alphabet said that “physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior.”
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The protests were organized by the No Tech For Apartheid campaign and protesters held signs that read “No More Genocide For Profit” and “We Stand with Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Googlers.”
The company said it would continue to investigate and take action as needed, reports The Guardian.
The protesters say that Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract granted to Google and Amazon.com in 2021, provides cloud services to the Israeli government and aids in the creation of military applications.
A form letter on the campaign’s website demands that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian “end all ties with Israeli apartheid and cut the Project Nimbus contract.”
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Google says the Nimbus contract “is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” It added that Google Cloud “supports numerous governments around the world, including the Israeli government.”
“We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries, who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy.”
The No Tech for Apartheid campaign called the firings a “flagrant act of retaliation” and a “clear indication that Google values its $1.2 billion contract with the genocidal Israeli government and military more than its own workers.”
The campaign added that some of the individuals fired did not directly participate in the protests.
Despite what its critics allege, Israel has attempted to warn and shield civilians as the IDF hunts the Hamas terrorists who hid themselves among Gaza’s civilian population and infrastructure after the group’s October 7 attack. As well, critics who call Israel an apartheid state ignore the freedoms enjoyed by the democratic country’s Arab citizens, who play major roles in business, the judiciary and even the Knesset.
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Gas prices have not been this high since August 2022
There’s a price shocker coming at the pumps.
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Gas in Ontario, including the GTA, will go up 14 cents a litre overnight for customers filling up on Thursday, says Dan McTeague, the president of Canadians for Affordable Energy.
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“So going from $1.65.9 (per litre) going to $1.79.9,” said McTeague adding the increase will affect the entire province except for northwestern Ontario, which gets its prices from the prairies market.
“That’s the highest level since August, 2022, almost two years ago,” he added.
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McTeague said the reason for the price hike is that stations are switching over to summer-blend gasoline.
“Around this time of year prices go up to reflect the new blend of gasoline, which is more expensive to make,” he explained. “Butane is used in the winter, for gasoline, whereas in the summer it’s alkyaltes. Alkyaltes are extremely expensive.”
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“In the winter you want your ignition to start quickly in cold temperatures, you uses volatile butane. You take that out in the summer. That’s a big difference. This is going to be around for awhile and it could get higher,” McTeague said.
McTeague also blamed the rise in gas prices in Canada on the carbon tax increase, the rising price of oil, and the weak Canadian dollar.
“It just makes a bad situation worse,” he said. “It’s just another brick in the wall, another load on the camel’s bank. The cost of denying our resources, blocking pipelines, is one of the most significant reasons why the Canadian dollar is so weak.”
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