*Not investment advice www.newstatesman.com/business/eco...

If human editors can’t control who reviews science, it’s no longer peer review — it’s a rubber-stamp machine designed for volume and profit, not quality. I have no intention of attaching my name to it. So I’m out.

of course

In the course of today, His Majesty’s Government will do both of the following things: - moan loudly about X and blame it for the grotesque scenes in Belfast; - create huge amounts of content for X to monetise To govern is to choose.

This is just more posturing of Anthropic as the 'safe' AI company. The media are doing free PR for a five-year-old company with a valuation approaching $1 trillion despite having no profit to show for the products that it produces. That valuation is built off this marketing. (15/22)

Bregman appears to have gone all-in on AI, which is dismaying. But perhaps not surprising when his foundation is part funded by effective altruists.

These pause AI nonsense calls have been happening for a long time. It's always about power because they wanna consolidate and stop racing against each other for no gains. Here's a previous time of many they tried the same silliness: futureoflife.org/open-letter/...

"Even if the Microsoft Office team employed a philosopher who said you shouldn’t be so certain, because consciousness is not well understood, that would not be sufficient reason for you to take this idea seriously." www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

this really is wild they just asked Meta AI chatbot support for access to high profile accounts and it obliged comes after Google complete broke its search results these are not serious, capable companies deserving of professional respect. they rushed shit product to market.

restaurants and retail stores in the US are now getting complaints and angry yelp reviews, because they are not open when LLMs [incorrectly] say they are; because they don’t carry products LLMs [incorrectly] say they do. relying on LLMs for facts ruins every day experience, truth, and sanity.

lastfm is independent again! Hopefully a case of the enshittification trend being bucked 🤞

Blair constantly repeating the mantra "artificial intelligence revolution", no citations given alas

There's an exceptionalist belief that the UK's immune to the worst political extremes. In reality, we were lucky not to get a fascist government in the 1930s. Now that the world's richest man supports our most extreme political party, we need more than luck. We need to get the money out of politics.

glad they found this and will use their work for good to explain this, but also this is self-evident! don't let AI also drain us of our ability to know a priori such tech is wrong and harmful, using common sense so yes, evidence is wonderful, but it serves to support what we knew, not vice versa!

I think this is a key insight about the AI psychosis we are seeing exhibited by big tech CEOs. The further you are away from the work, the more you assume it’s trivial for Claude or ChatGPT to replace the worker.

$9-billion taxpayer transfer to a $5 trillion company for US spy agencies to go all in on AI. NYT doesn't include a single critical word from a privacy or civil liberties expert. Just a don't-worry-about-it assurance at the end. Also: Anthropic is not our friend. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/u...

"Science is not simply a sequence of tasks that can be optimized....The scientific system thrives on inefficiency: redundant efforts, failed attempts, and divergent paths. These are not costs to be eliminated but sources of discovery." Excellent essay! ⬇️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

These episodes are great. Bit annoyed that they drag Weizenbaum for the name 'Eliza', though, given it was a clever play on Pygmalion and decidedly not an early example of contemporary tech bro feminisation of chatbots

Academia of today We publish articles nobody reads to build our CVs in order to get jobs that do not exist. Brilliant, just bloody brilliant.

This is an interesting statement for someone so fixated with the 'objective' truth of whether or not there is a god: "But now, as an evolutionary biologist, I say the following. If these creatures are not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?"

In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis. Paywall bypass: archive.is/6RdK9

samuel beckett was born on this day 120 years ago. astonishing to think that if he had survived, and could run 100m in 9.57 seconds, he would be not only the oldest but also the fastest man in the world - together with his nobel prize for literature, an astonishing trifecta

Some absolute bangers in this wonderful takedown of big AI's transhumanist technosalvationism: www.todayintabs.com/p/a-i-isn-t-...

I'm not entirely sure if other scientists are noticing it, but I'm seeing the AI hype in science in the connectionist and related spaces popping, I think? Citation counts for new connectionist silliness are on the floor compared to esp critical work in cognitive science, it seems. We'll see...

Now also in The Nerve: about #Palantir and #technofascism www.thenerve.news/p/palentir-a...

The extent to which the establishment is drinking the Anthropic marketing koolaid on Mythos is depressingly predictable. This sober analysis from Cal Newport is worth a look: youtu.be/k-8stQCeQiE

Happy Tax Day, New York. We’re taxing the rich.

There is a powerful pressure among academic philosophers nowadays to take seriously claims of artificial general intelligence or AI sentience. Serious engagement with such propositions requires many layers of intellectual dishonesty combined with a willingness to watch the world burn.

Why is pro-AI still posturing as anti-AI, and why is the general public still willing to believe the charade?

Going to be so funny watching people try and act like this never happened one day

Wonderful post on the absurdity of 'AI' and how it's warping workplace and industrial dynamics: leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2026/0...

EsoLang-Bench arxiv.org/abs/2603.09678 In which it's made abundantly clear (yet again) that LLMs don't reason, and their effectiveness at coding is based purely on the glut of python code that's out there

Anthropic are unhinged www.anthropic.com/research/dep...

His students deserve and should demand a refund

“According to AI companies, creativity isn’t an innate human endeavor, but a problem, an inefficiency waiting for a technological intervention…Such rhetoric conveniently abstracts creativity from a complex, embodied human experience & represents it as a computational problem to be solved.”

"The very first thing he did is launch Trump Coin and it just felt like the extractiveness has now been institutionalized" Area crypto guy is *so close* to getting it. The whole damn thing is extractive, you numbnuts www.coindesk.com/policy/2026/...

Why isn’t this video on the front page of every newspaper? The country we thought we had is lost.

This is great, and its central observations about factory-fication apply far beyond the academic context

'With it, the danger is that, under a narrative of financial constraints, universities take actions that emphasise governance practices that reshape behaviour so deeply that, over time, what remains may still be called a ‘university’, but no longer acts like one.' Astute, informed, important. 4/4

Extremely petty peeve: podcasters (usually North Americans) saying 'with that being said' to mean 'moving on from what I just said' rather than the correct meaning which is 'despite/in contrast to what I just said'

amazing how the entire machine can pivot within 24 hours. no need to slowly upsell the argument; just issue new marching orders

The ethical and legal damage will be with us forever but it’s the raging incompetence that will strike first, within the next few days.

2020s: AI "System Prompts" are lengthy, carefully constructed sets of expert rules about a particular domain, created by "prompt engineers". 1980s: AI "Expert Systems" were lengthy, carefully constructed sets of expert rules about a particular domain, created by "knowledge engineers".

The real breakthrough of the year -- something that matters far, far more than generative AI ever will.

Just AISI there, using 'post volume' and 'negative sentiment' on the r/CharacterAI subreddit as a source of evidence for the impact of emotional dependence on AI www.aisi.gov.uk/frontier-ai-...

of all places, why the hell would i want a 'year in review' from linkedin

🔴 REVEALED 🔴 The Institute of Economic Affairs – the anti-state, anti-climate pressure group that "incubated" Liz Truss – was bankrolled by oil giants and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. 📝 Exclusive findings from @desmog.com 👇

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that