The investment chief at $48 billion Global X believes AI stocks will continue to dominate in 2024 — and shares 12 top places to put your money now - Business Insider   

Global X has been an under-the-radar winner during this year's artificial intelligence revolution.

Instead of creating semiconductors like Nvidia (NVDA) or chatbots like Alphabet (GOOGL), the exchange-traded fund (ETF) provider develops investment products that offer exposure to those AI leaders. The $48 billion firm offers the largest AI-focused ETF, the Global X Robotics & Artificial Intelligence ETF (BOTZ), and two other top-five AI ETFs, according to ETF.com.

As investors have scrambled to get exposure to AI stocks this year, the BOTZ ETF has risen from $1.6 billion in January to about $2.4 billion in net assets today, while the Global X Artificial Intelligence & Technology ETF (AIQ) has about $848 million net assets — up nearly seven-fold from $125 million in January, according to Global X.

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Stop Planting Trees, Says Guy Who Inspired World to Plant a Trillion Trees - WIRED   

In a cavernous theater lit up with the green shapes of camels and palms at COP28 in Dubai, ecologist Thomas Crowther, former chief scientific adviser for the United Nations’ Trillion Trees Campaign, was doing something he never would have expected a few years ago: begging environmental ministers to stop planting so many trees.

Mass plantations are not the environmental solution they’re purported to be, Crowther argued when he took the floor on December 9 for one of the summit’s “Nature Day” events. The potential of newly created forests to draw down carbon is often overstated. They can be harmful to biodiversity. Above all, they are really damaging when used, as they often are, as avoidance offsets— “as an excuse to avoid cutting emissions,” Crowther said.

The popularity of planting new trees is a problem—at least partly—of Crowther’s own making. In 2019, his lab at ETH Zurich found that the Earth had room for an additional 1.2 trillion trees, which, the lab’s research suggested, could suck down as much as two-thirds of the carbon that humans have historically emitted into the atmosphere. “This highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date,” the study said. Crowther subsequently gave dozens of interviews to that effect.

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Wearable Tech Moves to Your Face in 2024, Jam-Packed With A.I. - Inc.com   

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Wearables are back. Heading into 2024, they're among tech's buzziest buzzwords--and though they'll continue to track your steps, heartrate and even blood-oxygen levels, how you wear them is set to change. Your next wearable device may sit on your face as a pair of smart glasses or a more futuristic set of goggles. How smart? Very, since there's a tech industry push to put A.I. into these devices.

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The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry - WIRED   

If you work at a spy agency tasked with surveilling the communications of more than 160 million people, it’s probably a good idea to make sure all the data in your possession stays off the open internet. Just ask Bangladesh’s National Telecommunication Monitoring Center, which security researchers found connected to a leaky database that exposed everything from names and email addresses to cell phone numbers and bank account details. The data was likely just used for testing purposes, but WIRED confirmed at least some of the data is linked to real people.

A fight is brewing in the United States Congress over the future of a powerful surveillance program. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is set to expire at the end of the year. With the December 31 deadline quickly approaching, members of Congress and civil liberties groups are criticizing Section 702 for enabling the “incidental” surveillance of Americans’ communications and “abuses” by the FBI. While a privacy-preserving update to the program has been introduced in Congress, some 702 critics remain concerned that lawmakers will push through reauthorization using other, “must-pass” legislation.

The US Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency this week rolled out its plan for implementing the Biden administration’s executive order on artificial intelligence. CISA’s efforts will focus on defending against weaponized AI and how to incorporate the technology for national security purposes.

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