Police AI chief admits crime-fighting tech will have bias but vows to tackle it

A police chief has admitted artificial intelligence used to boost crime fighting will contain bias but pledged to combat the risks.Labour wants a dramatic expansion of police use of AI within England and Wales, with police chiefs also believing it could help keep law enforcement up to date with new criminal threats.Alex Murray told the Guardian that a new national police AI centre would recognise the risks of bias and minimise them.Bias in use of AI in policing could result in instances where algorithms – often trained on historical data reflecting past human prejudices – systematically produce unfair outcomes, such as overtargeting minority communities or misidentifying individuals based on race, gender, or socioeconomic status.Murray, the director of threat leadership with the National Crime Agency, and the national lead for AI, said: “Once you’ve recognised and minimised [bias], how do you train officers to deal with outputs to ensure that it is further minimised?“If you talk about live facial recognition or predictive policing, there will be bias, and you need to get in the data scientists and the data engineers to clean the data, to train the model appropriately, and then to test it

New datacentres risk doubling Great Britain’s electricity use, regulator says

The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog.Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity – 5GW more than the country’s current peak demand.The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a “surge in demand” for connection applications between November 2024 and June last year, with a significant number coming from datacentres. This has exceeded even the most ambitious forecasts

Palantir deals are a threat to our data rights as UK citizens | Letters

For 100 years, the UK government has led us through existential threats, including two world wars. But instead of resisting the latest threat to democratic accountability, it has welcomed it with open arms: Palantir Technologies (NHS deal with AI firm Palantir called into question after officials’ concerns revealed, 12 February).This polarising US surveillance giant provides data-fusion and AI platforms used by by the US for immigration enforcement and by Israel in the Gaza conflict. Its software amplifies state power through militarised analytics and opaque algorithms.The current government hasn’t just surrendered citizens’ data rights to Palantir – it has paid for the privilege

Sam Altman defends AI’s energy toll by saying it also takes a lot to ‘train a human’

The OpenAI boss, Sam Altman, has tried to ease concerns about how much power is used by artificial intelligence models by comparing it to the amount of energy required by human development.“People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model – but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman told the Indian Express recently while in India for the AI Impact summit. “It takes about 20 years of life – and all the food you consume during that time – before you become smart.”Despite that defense, he said that the public assessment of AI’s energy consumption was “fair”, adding: “We need to move towards nuclear or wind and solar very quickly.”Those remarks come amid growing discussion about the environmental impact of the datacenters required to power AI models – and, more generally, about technology’s possible impact on society

US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacenter bids for their land: ‘I’m not for sale’

When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries.According to Huddleston, the men’s client, an unnamed “Fortune 100 company”, sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement.More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer had applied for a 2

Amazon’s cloud ‘hit by two outages caused by AI tools last year’

Amazon’s huge cloud computing arm reportedly experienced at least two outages caused by its own artificial intelligence tools, raising questions about the company’s embrace of AI as it lays off human employees.A 13-hour interruption to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) operations in December was caused by an AI agent, Kiro, autonomously choosing to “delete and then recreate” a part of its environment, the Financial Times reported.AWS, which provides vital infrastructure for much of the internet, suffered several outages last year.One incident, in October, downed dozens of sites for hours and prompted discussion over the concentration of online services on infrastructure owned by a few massive companies. AWS has won 189 UK government contracts worth £1