The climate costs of technology and TikTok’s court date

Greetings from Yifan, your #techasia host this week. I'm sending this text after a flight to New York, where I'll be collaborating in a Climate Economics Journalism Fellowship at New York University.

The meeting comes as world leaders gather in the town to debate essentially the most pressing global issues on the annual United Nations General Assembly. Leaders of the 193 UN member states will begin the overall debate on Tuesday next week, when delegates from each country will address the international community.

The escalating climate crisis has been a central theme in speeches by world leaders in recent times and is predicted to be a spotlight at this yr's gathering as well.

As our world undergoes a significant technological transformation, the discussion focuses totally on how recent technologies could affect our economy. Yet their impact on the climate is usually neglected, akin to The hidden costs of AIThis rapidly evolving technology has an insatiable appetite for energy and a growing carbon footprint that may lead to an acceleration of wildfires, floods, extreme weather and all the risks that climate change brings.

However, the climate costs of AI are unlikely to be high on the agenda for world leaders at this yr's UN General Assembly, as governments world wide are still grappling with the basics of regulating artificial intelligence, including the problems of misinformation and copyright infringement that arise with generative AI.

There is not any global framework for regulating this potentially revolutionary technology, but some countries, notably the US and China, are racing to set regulatory standards. Can the 2 AI superpowers reach some consensus on the General Assembly on the best way to control the powerful recent tool? We'll need to wait and see.

TikTok’s day in court

Monday was perhaps one of the vital days in TikTok's history. The ByteDance-owned app presented its arguments before three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in an effort to overturn a sell-or-ban law passed in Washington in April.

TikTok argues that the U.S. government's forced divestiture – based on the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act – is unconstitutional. The law violates American users' First Amendment rights and the corporate's right to equal protection under the law, it says.

But judge weighed the query Whether TikTok needs to be granted constitutional rights because of its Chinese ownership and the potential national security threat the US government poses to the country through the app is Nikkei Asia's Yifan Yu writes.

The fate of the app continues to be uncertain following Monday's court hearing. After hearing arguments from each side, the judges didn’t make an instantaneous decision on the case. TikTok has asked the judge to issue a short lived restraining order to stop the 270-day countdown that requires ByteDance to divest its shares by January 19, 2025, or face a whole ban on the app within the US.

Restriction of chip technology exports to China

The US and Japan are near reaching an agreement after intensive talks on Restricting technology exports to the Chinese chip industryalthough Tokyo fears retaliation from Beijing.

Negotiations between the 2 countries, which have dragged on for months, are near a breakthrough, people accustomed to the matter in Washington and Tokyo say, but a Japanese official warned that the situation stays “quite fragile” amid concerns about China's response. Demetrius of Sevastopol in Washington and Leo Lewis in Tokyo writing for the Financial Times.

Washington desires to impose recent export controls ahead of the presidential election in November, including a measure that might force corporations outside the US to acquire licenses to sell products to China that might profit the technology sector there.

Japan and the United States have been discussing the best way to limit the impact of any Chinese retaliation as Washington and its allies seek to counter Beijing.

The US desires to make it harder for China to acquire vital tools for chip production. The export controls are intended to shut loopholes in existing regulations and add restrictions that take into consideration the progress made by Huawei and other Chinese corporations in chip production over the past two years.

The restrictions would have the best impact on ASML within the Netherlands and Tokyo Electron in Japan.

Energy bill of Asian technology

Economies across Asia try to capitalize on once-in-a-lifetime opportunities as supply chains shift away from China, but have they got enough clean energy to sustain economic growth, combat global warming while attracting investment in chips, artificial intelligence, data centers and other technologies?

Taiwan and South Korea have the second and third largest semiconductor industries on the planet after the USA, while Japan is working to regain its lost chip expertise. All three economies proceed to be major consumers of fossil fuelsJapan and Taiwan have even increased their dependence on them because the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, Liane Lauly And Cheng Ting Fang Report.

For countries like Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand, the issue is twofold: all of them profit greatly from corporations shifting production out of China amid escalating tensions between Washington and Beijing.

Who is missing?

Most of the world is hesitant to debate the best way to regulate AI on the international level.

Of the 193 UN member states, 118 haven’t participated in any interregional AI governance initiative, akin to the OECD AI Principles, the G20 AI Principles or the recent Seoul Ministerial Declaration, in accordance with a report released on Thursday by the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Panel on Artificial Intelligence.

However, the report, released just days before the UN General Assembly in New York, found that Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US participated in the entire leading international AI governance initiatives mentioned, in accordance with Nikkei Asia's Yifan Yu reports.

“With AI development within the hands of just a few multinational corporations in just a few countries, there may be a risk that the impacts of unleashing artificial intelligence might be imposed on most individuals without them having a say in the selections involved,” the report said, calling on countries to make use of the UN as a platform to put the muse for a comprehensive global framework for AI governance.

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