Where do the percentages come from when people say AI could wipe us out? Rasmus goes looking and finds a survey of 2,778 AI researchers whose median answer put the chance of human extinction, or something similarly severe, at 5%, with no timeframe attached. His bigger point is closer to home: the harm we can already see comes from how people use AI, and from how we have stopped questioning systems that still hallucinate.
We also talk about AI-made content in bulk, from AI music to the new official portrait of Denmark's King Frederik X, where AI-generated "more realistic" versions spread quickly online, and about what a painted portrait is for in the first place.
Jens brings news from Finland, where Google has been ordered to pause work on two planned data-centre sites after hundreds of hectares of forest were cleared before the environmental impact assessments were finished. AI has a physical footprint in land and energy, and the demand behind it comes from all of us. That takes us on to energy and the Danish power grid.
Benjamin turns to Indonesia, where a state-backed plan to grow rice and sugarcane in Papua was set to cover around 3 million hectares, an area about 70% the size of Denmark, until the government announced in October that it would stop clearing forest for it. From there we get to the cost of acting on the wrong numbers, with a detour via China's one-child policy and the engineer behind both leaded petrol and CFCs.
We wrap up with something new in George: the audience map. Add the Audience category to the records you want to show, enable sharing, and anyone with the link or QR code can view a public, view-only map of just those records. In the demo, a temporary stay-out area for forest machines shows up on the shared map once it is added, and we talk about why that matters when printed signs go out of date.
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