Undergraduate moral philosophy question: to what extent is someone's apparent goodness contingent on the alignment of their experience and choices with their expectations of what life can and should be

Folk outraged about digital ID as though the infrastructure isn't all already there and operating (national insurance, passport, tax). It's just another interface on top of all that. If there's an issue, then it already very much exists

Today's the day! My new book MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER is finally out! If you want to understand why tech billionaires are so obsessed with impossible ideas about space and AI — and why that's dangerous — this book is for you. #MoreEverythingForever www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-...

sometimes the world doesn’t need to hear your take

psa: it's 'envideya', not 'nivideya'

“I don’t remember anyone ever saying to us ‘Oh I just don't think we're properly reflecting the Green Party view, or the liberal-left view on this story’,” one former BBC journalist told me. “It was always just slanted in one direction – which was basically the nativist, authoritarian direction.”

Data, striving to represent, can never keep up

Nice touch from DuckDuckGo

Can we send the phrase "writ large" to Room 101 please

I'm not going to repost any of the insane antisemitic conspiracy bullshit that grok is spewing today, but it highlights how absolutely essentially is that we not let LLMs become a form of epistemic grounding for our society.

Good day as any to delete Facebook, Instagram, and/or Threads if you have not already The fact that Meta will not rule out using private photos on your camera roll to train AI is abominable, full stop futurism.com/meta-sketchy...

A full design for the George Street and First New Town project, has been approved by the Transport and Environment Committee. The report follows the completion of the technical designs phase and sets out the next stages of the project.

All these things happened to me in London today. I paid 3 shillings to the coachman to convey me to London - a distance of a mere 30 miles or so, e’en though twas a Saturday. /1

Brilliant interview with @mmitchell.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/7089...

Sam Altman has made a habit of penning new manifestos every time he wants to raise cash. This time, he's promising that "gentle singularity" has already begun—as part of a play to raise billions from the Saudis and the Emiratis. Here's what the "gentle singularity" looks like in reality:

New paper out today, accepted at #FAccT2025, led by Jake Stein and me: "Not Even Nice Work If You Can Get It; A Longitudinal Study of Uber's Algorithmic Pay and Pricing" arxiv.org/abs/2506.15278 Over the last 3 years, we've been working with @workerinfox.bsky.social to audit Uber's algorithms. 1/

It's because they have flattened the idea of "intelligence" to mean mastering language* *which isn't even the case with current llms

Fwiw, I do not think this is what Tim Berners Lee had in mind

Journalists falling over themselves to express surprise at the Trump-Musk bust up says a lot about the state of our media

Amazing account of ChatGPT's sycophancy and confabulation on steroids. amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-e...

OpenAI is featuring a "Looksmaxxing GPT" that provides "PSL ratings" for photos. It will rate people as "subhuman", and advise men to get invasive procedures like jaw surgery to "increase their sexual market value" among women, who it describes as "hypergamous by nature".

Luddites weren't anti-tech. They were against technology being used by the capitalist class to capture wealth at the expense of the worker. I am a Luddite, and a tech enthusiast. They're not in opposition. I want technology that makes MY life better, not that sells my life piecemeal to corps.

Brilliant essay -- in particular the lamentations about the unseriousness of the academic machine hit home thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/happy-in-t...

"At least I know how to say Milngavie." www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

LUDDITE POPE

I hereby lay claim to 'OligarchAI'

Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI

26 April 1986: What was meant to be a routine safety test at Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant became the worst nuclear disaster in history. 🧵⬇️(1/4)

What a time to be alive... 'serving suggestions' were always aspirational but at least in principle they were, em, real

I'm thrilled that this huge paper is now out — Machine's Eye View: Postmodern Data Science and the Politics of Ground Truth I advance a critical theory of the epistemic politics of machine learning by tying it postmodernism and actuarial data science journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

What this reminds me of more than anything is the experiment where baby monkeys, deprived of their mother, clung to coat hangers draped with scraps of cloth as surrogates. 1/n

There is still time to give us your views on our draft plan to transform Seafield into a new environmentally friendly neighbourhood. consultationhub.edinburgh.gov.uk/sfc/seafield...

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

Worked on this piece of empirical consumer research on uses and attitudes to generative AI, just published. Some fascinating findings in there on trust and understanding www.drcf.org.uk/publications...

In 2025 top 3 uses of GenAI are: therapy/companionship, organising life, and finding purpose. I think something has gone pretty badly wrong here. hbr.org/2025/04/how-...

So OpenAI is actively marketing ChatGPT to students during college finals season in the U.S. We've talked many (many) times before about the kinds of harm that can come from giving over too much epistemic and heuristic authority over to these systems, but additionally, there's been at least three…

On today of all days, with Princeton now in the Trump administration's crosshairs, I taught my undergraduates about standpoint epistemology, strong objectivity, and communities of knowledge. On how our unique perspectives as individuals don't threaten the scientific project. They strengthen it.

New MIT study: "Overall, higher daily usage [of chat bots] – across all modalities and conversation types – correlated with higher loneliness, dependence, and problematic use, and lower socialization." www.media.mit.edu/publications...

Lots of good lines in this "A.I.’s most revolutionary potential is helping experts apply their expertise better and faster. But for that to work, there has to be experts."

Right now there are a lot of new eyes on Signal, and not all of them are familiar with secure messaging and its nuances. Which means there’s misinfo flying around that might drive people away from Signal and private communications. 1/

Unfortunately this reinforces the idea that social values a) rest on scientific principles, and b) are measurable. A reductionist and positivist mindset provided rocket fuel for AI-driven dystopia in the first place. AI & its alternatives are political problems.

Strange that folk are talking about libgen/scihub as if they're a Meta conspiracy, rather than a response to a rapacious academic publishing model that has been exploited by an even more rapacious AI business model. Choose your target carefully

I wrote "I am stressed" on a piece of paper and gave it to a photocopier. You'll never believe what happened next!

A little bit of Cicero for the weekend.

🚨 @newscientist.com SCOOP: I've exclusively obtained Peter Kyle's interactions with ChatGPT using FOI laws - in what I believe may be a world-first transparency release. The chatbot said "Lack of Government or Institutional Support" slowed UK AI adoption www.newscientist.com/article/2472...

The wonder of Voyager: This is the most beautiful thread I’ve read in a long time.

Ironically, Governor Carney was his actual title at one time

🔸Demos of logic maps & other visualisations - work with SMU Centre for Digital Law 🔸Unique IDs for legislation paras (h/t Hamish Fraser) in Word & web, for pop-ups linking words to definitions (incl in Interpretation Law) 🔸Using "may", "may not" & "may only" #RulesAsCode substack.com/@digitallegi...

AOL warned us of the dangers of logging on. It would play for us the screams of the damned. But we didn’t listen. We didn’t listen.