Phenomenal. In my 10 year update of A Brief History, I make the point that in the first edition, not one disease had been successfully treated using gene therapy. Today that number is at least 7.

Last year, I published a short thing on an experiment in St Ives bay. Glad to see that @drrobbellamy.bsky.social @a-laurie-waller.bsky.social and Emily Cox have just published a proper paper on this journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Great to read about the amazing achievement of my UCL colleagues. What a break through!

Farage asked on @lbc.co.uk whether he agreed with on the unproven link between paracetamol and autism “I have no idea... We were told thalidomide was a v safe drug and it isn’t. who knows. I don’t know, you don’t know…when it comes to science I don’t side with anybody. It’s never settled.”

I'm normally one of those people who thinks satire doesn't cut through. (“Those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler" - Peter Cook). But Trump seems to be doing the satirists' PR).

imagine if a family of beavers randomly showed up right now and finished whatever thing you've been putting off

Meanwhile the UK version of the magazine features the blood transfusion, erection-measuring guy on its cover. 😔

Absolutely captivating 1987 documentary about identical twins Freda & Greta Chaplin who moved & spoke as one. A sensitively made exploration of their intense co-dependency, obsessive behaviour & complex shared life story youtu.be/eAD9YbPNbCw?...

New politics of technology case study just dropped. Apparently the F-35 is woke

Claudia @cchwalisz.bsky.social does a brilliant job here of explaining the politics and practicalities of citizens' assemblies

The Economist is hiring a science and technology correspondent

fraid so

Just got sucked into @neal.fun's "Not a Robot" neal.fun/not-a-robot/

This was fun today. I got to see the always-marvellous Natalie Williams and Soul Family playing at the main stage.

This is not just maths. It's a design choice, supported by benchmarks that reward false certainty. Good to see OpenAI do some of the research, but it's also a reminder that OpenAI shouldn't be relied upon to do all the research.

Whatever happened to Jon Elster’s civilising effect of hypocrisy?

36 mo postdoc / research fellow position in Philosophy, History, and/or Social Studies of the Life Sciences in the STS dept. at Technical Universtiy of Munich, apps due Oct 31: #histphil #histsci #histSTM www.sts.sot.tum.de/en/sts/arbei...

Important indeed. But also important to note that most of those are not trumpets. They are assorted tenor horns, trombones, euphonia and such.

If something is good news for those who are losing the race, maybe give up on the race analogy?

‘How easily the disproportion of consequence is forgotten when a high-status professional is involved. For the consultant, at worst, “embarrassment”; for Martha ...’ @paullaity.bsky.social on the search for accountability after his daughter’s preventable death: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Wow. Have you read the new Tom Friedman brain-gravy yet? It is wild!

With a nod to our @hypestudies.bsky.social meeting last week in Barcelona. Thanks Eryk.

The video implies that the acceptable, uncontroversial uses of these things will be when the wearer is alone. Are they a technology of solitude?

“nine benchmarks use binary grading systems that award zero points for AIs expressing uncertainty.”

Parents are testifying now at a Senate hearing on the harms of AI chatbots www.judiciary.senate.gov/committee-ac...

A key line is that billionaires and politicians have bought beachfront properties, therefore we can't believe what scientists tell us about climate change. (The committee chair is Marjorie Taylor Greene).

I've been listening in to @thehonestbroker.bsky.social and others talking to congress about weather modification. The grandstanding and wilful obfuscation by some members of congress is truly 🤯. The witnesses did a good job in the circumstances rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/playing-go...

Fascinating job opportunity at ARIA. Leading public engagement for the climate innovation programme aria.pinpointhq.com/en/postings/...

I wrote a response to Thomas Friedman's "magical thinking" on AI here: aiguide.substack.com/p/magical-th...

This was a superb conference. A pleasure to be a part of it.

Something I talked about in the post I did over the summer on radicalisation. It's an important factor in elite radicalisation. samf.substack.com/p/the-radica...

Looks like free-speech absolutism is relative.

Well obviously he’s lying. But I’m also deeply sad that so many show up, knowing what we know about this guy.

I found this bit particularly telling. Googles uses AI to stop people following links, so they can stay within Google’s world. Even ignoring the unreliability of AI, that ‘reset’ looks far from emancipatory.

This is excellent. Decca Aitkenhead, in a carefully probing interview, exposes the naivete of TBL’s optimism

Our Responsible AI UK programme is small by the standards of the original ELSI programme, but inspired by some of the lessons Alondra draws here. And the social science and humanities funding is still minuscule compared to the rest. Time to scale up?

Here was my first data point. The billionaires are relaxed about the AI bubble. They're owning the hype cycle. So how does hype studies respond? @hypestudies.bsky.social

So many insights springing out of our Hype Studies conference in Barcelona. One, from investigative journalist Christo Buschek: the news outfits currently winning are those that resisted the previous wave of online hype @hypestudies.bsky.social. Christo was one of the team behind this

🧵 The summer of 2025 has been AI's "cruel summer"—wrongful deaths, dangerous therapy chatbots, medical misinformation, facial recognition failures. These aren't isolated glitches but predictable harms from systems deployed without adequate oversight. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Comparing the @nytimes.com very interesting analysis of Grok and the @economist.com very weird take on 'Woke AI'. www.economist.com/internationa... and www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/t.... Some thoughts...

The eagle has captured my sentiments exactly

it's the little things that piss people off, and robots don't have the same sympathy margins as human drivers.

I hope this ishmael finds you whale

Encouraging to see scientists debating this stuff. I’m one of the people helping ARIA to make sense of these issues as they fund work in this area.

@hypestudies.bsky.social conference starts tomorrow, choo choo! I'm very excited to share our preprint with @cianooo.bsky.social and Joshua Moon: "Can buzzwords create infrastructures? Reflecting on the Water-Energy-Food Nexus approach" . zenodo.org/records/1699...

Awkward moment as CEO puts up the wrong WhatThreeWords address for the company picnic. Sends team to Wisconsin.

Join us at the hybrid keynote at the @hypestudies.bsky.social Conference by Gemma Milne, author of "Smoke & Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It" Wednesday 10Sept from 17 to 18:30 CEST. Free with previous registration: framaforms.org/dont-believe...

Our list of hype studies resources is now open to the public! hypestudies.org/resources

We're in Newcastle for the first UK AI Research Symposium www.ukairs.ac.uk. Gopal Ramchurn, head of Responsible AI UK, starts with a reference to Swan's lightbulb, invented in Newcastle before the Americans improved it and took the credit.