Everyone should go read "More Work for Mother," by Ruth Schwartz Cowan.

New today in The Important Work from @kconrad.bsky.social. Questions to ask when the ed tech companies come to your campus. Wise and useful.

Like, lol, this fantasy only makes sense if you are intentionally engineering the demise of civilization such that the long term existential risk timeline maps onto the 10-20 years of building a space city. There are a handful of people i'd like to just go live in luxury and stop doing stuff.

Ted is a CS professor (and Oscar winner) who has also become an STS scholar. He is teaching his computer graphics class this semester by pairing STS and technical readings. What a model. See the thread for some great parings.

Great oped on Yale's remarkable rejection of academic freedom - and our Yale AAUP chapter's proposal to start to make academic freedom real for all Yale faculty and researchers. Check it out! yaledailynews.com/articles/why... @yaleaaup.bsky.social

Really enjoyed this piece by @pranavdixit.bsky.social on the demise of the Supernatural VR app. Grateful that Pranav quoted the central lesson I teach to undergrads in my "Technology and Culture" class. Highlight, tho, is the Roomba named "Mark Suckerberg." www.businessinsider.com/zuckerberg-m...

Using five courses i took in undergraduate to tell a specific story: 1. Unified Engineering 2. Autonomous Reasoning and Decision Making 3. Space Systems Engineering 4. Probabilistic Systems Analysis 5. The Rise of Modern Science 5, uh, set me on a completely different path

“Or do productivity increases from AI assistance undermine skill development?… We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery” Another study showing that AI creates a world where we are producing more, but understanding less. AI Bad.

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

In 2021 I was telling people in my field of art history to stop legitimizing the use of image recognition, to stop applying for grants to use AI in identifying the subjects of portraiture bc this was what such work was being used to further. All this was obvious. theconversation.com/how-ai-is-hi...

I have a new article out! It’s about the “technological fictions” that Big Tech leaders perform during corporate keynotes, particular Zuck and Cook as they tried to sell the metaverse and spatial computing. 1/

Just in time to be in conversation with Meta's backing off of Horizon Worlds--new from me in Games & Culture: "Metaverse Engineering: Epic v. Apple, Ontopolitical Play, and Gaming the Law." journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I haven't had words to capture what i've been feeling, so i've just been reading others' words. The Boss reminds: just say the names and describe the acts of the people who are evil. that's enough for now. Get Noem and Miller and anyone who was even close to this out of power. ICE out now.

AI can crunch data. It can’t replace scientists. Real discovery still depends on human judgment, creativity and collaboration. buff.ly/g48SKCW

this was an instant read for me. beautiful essay, @tamigraph.bsky.social!

“There needs to be some deep reckoning with what we do with a tool that benefits individuals but destroys science.” @lmesseri.bsky.social www.science.org/content/arti...

Let's start by not believing the claims being made corporations about these products when it comes to education. Do not let a whole generation be guinea pigs. Demand rigorous evidence of efficacy before incorporating into classrooms.

The new framing by promoters of AI Scientists is that you still need an experienced human in the loop (as stated in this article). But HOW do you get such a human if these tools are used earlier and earlier in training and education. Also, the article gives the answer to the title's question: no.

I'm co-chairing the Society for Social Studies of Science @4sweb.bsky.social Conference in Toronto, Oct 2026. #STS #scipol #innovation Theme: "TechnoPower • Technoscientific Futures". Open panel submissions portal is open! ls! Deadline: 2nd February 2026 www.4sonline.org/about_the_co...

MAIHT3k newsletter: The narrative of the denialism frame is that those opposing "AI" are afraid, under-informed and/or engaging in wishful thinking. None of that is true: The people who oppose the "AI" project are actively fighting and refusing to accept the premise of tech bros and AI boosters.

If Fbook's purchase of Oculus in 2014 was the start of VR hype, Meta's reduction of Reality Labs is an official end of that chapter. But don't be fooled, Meta still wants to put a screen between you and the world. It's more pernicious, in the form of always-on, AI infused Ray-Bans. The cycle repeats

they had me at "worker-owned" and kept me with "We will not use AI, because it has no taste."

💯 "It would be a mistake to simply celebrate the death of the metaverse. Instead, we should understand why such a delusional fervor took hold so that we can inoculate ourselves as the next one spreads." tho i'm biased toward this reading given the book and articles i've written abt VR/metaverse ;)

Please apply (or encourage your grad students to apply) to our awesome funded summer program by January 15th!

"Sam Altman has defended the technology’s “right to learn” from books and articles, “like a human can.” This deceptive, feel-good idea prevents the public discussion we need to have about how AI companies are using the creative and intellectual works upon which they are utterly dependent."

we're hiring in STS @fasosmaastricht.bsky.social! deadline coming up soon (February 8). focus is the social science-y corners of STS preferably w/ some interest in sustainability & environment - but interpreted broadly. vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric...

I do not like writing abstracts for articles. How tempting it would be to give this task to an LLM. But an abstract isn't only a summary. It freshly articulates an argument that took 8,000 words to write in just 150 words. It signals the most powerful ideas, not simply the most frequent ideas.

<3 I remain so happy and humbled that "In the Land of the Unreal" won the Bateson prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology and was an honorable mention for the Fleck Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science. It was a good year for this book that I worked so hard on.

FWIW, the jury is still out on Gen AI being good at text summaries. Because it shortens & emphasizes text based on distribution, not meaning, it’s less of a summary (ie, salient points highlighted) than a compression (ie, the most frequently asserted terms in the distribution). Not the same thing!

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

We do not have to offer and I believe indeed should not offer any benefit of the doubt: Anything sold as "AI" should be presumed ineffective, exploitative, environmentally ruinous, bigotry-amplifying and otherwise until proven otherwise. /fin

totally normal for a flailing social media company and a nuclear fusion company to merge. definitely not corruption. nope nope nope.

I wrote 1200 fun words today! Here's how they end: "For those of us concerned with the rise of technofascism, there is critical potential in short circuiting the pathways by which authority is seized via proximity to scientific thought."

Here we go! @lmesseri.bsky.social & I wrote about epistemic risks of synthetic participants ('AI Surrogates') in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social (see 🧵 here) bsky.app/profile/mjcr...

Sorry, doing research with humans is hard! There isn't going to be a magical technology that makes it easier. @mjcrockett.bsky.social and I recently published about the risks of AI Surrogates, and why they are so appealing... See thread on the paper: bsky.app/profile/lmes...

"We face a social dilemma around the role of these empathy machines. Those who are most cognitively vulnerable may turn to these tools when what they most need is a flesh-and-blood human who will care for them, not sycophantically, but with thick empathy arising from the experience of being human."

Ten years ago.

I started this project because I was dissatisfied with scientific research and public discourse about “empathy machines” that began with virtual reality a decade ago, and has accelerated since the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022. 2/

New preprint: Empathy, Thick and Thin papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... It is perhaps foolhardy to attempt to say something new about a topic as widely studied as empathy. I tried anyway! 1/

Or better yet: make GenAI about an assault on civics. Because if you are selling a product that necessarily attempts to con one person into believing they are engaging with another person when they are not, you’re not just ruining education. You’re dismantling society’s foundations in social trust.

So the next time someone tries to draw you into a conversation about that piece they saw on 60 Minutes or read in the NYT about how educators are coping with/ combatting/whatever students using GenAI, don’t accept that framing. Make it about the industry that is impoverishing their education.

In a stroke of good timing, my article excoriating the metaverse (and taking shots at spatial computing) was just accepted at Games & Culture. How do these companies make implausible and undesirable futures seem inevitable? abstract posted here!

Um, if an LLMs's tendancy to lie and cheat isn't something that can be stopped, maybe this isn't a great product to incorporate at every level of our professional and personal lives?

There are many good arguments for why AI/ML will struggle to predict replicability. www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... I'm curious why, in light of these arguments and now data, COS is continuing to pursue this project.

"We’ve been contemplating our mechanical, electronic navels for too long. My God, how we need a breath of honest air!”" -Ray Bradbury, The Veldt. Or, the 1950 version of "touch grass"

This is HUGE news, that was reported right before Thanksgiving. I just looked online and, sure enough, all the grants that our PhD students normally apply for are not accepting applications this cycle. Maybe they will come back, maybe they won't. But right now, this is a devastating set back.

Tragic. This funded my dissertation research and many of the students in our program.

i'm staring into the future forged by "AI scientists" and, my friends, it is bleak. Humans might be slow and expensive, but let's all just agree that this trade off is worth it, m'kay?

My amazing department is hiring a Linguistic Anthropologist! careercenter.americananthro.org/job/707272/a...