CFP: swpaca.org "AI & Culture" area invites proposals on anything related to AI as tool, cultural phenomenon, creative force, or subject of scholarship. Submit: swpaca.org/summer-salon/ | Deadline: April 27 Please forward to any you think might be interested. Thanks! #swpaca26 @swpaca.bsky.social

On March 2, I teach a 2-month course "CSIS 290 - Artificial Intelligence: A Beginner's Guide". If you or anyone you know is interested, please share (officially in-person, but I'll be remote-friendly, including if you need/want to do this asynchronously). eservices.minnstate.edu/registration...

Announcing my new blog: SoulGraph.tech I figured it was past time to start blogging publicly thoughts about what will happen if/when AI becomes conscious. Please join me. I think these are important conversations to have.

My father learned to code in school. I learned to code at home, offline. Eldest child learned to code from online resources. Middle child learned to vibe code from/with AI. What will my youngest child learn?

What if, because people use AI so much, the incentive to put stuff on the web gets removed because no one is reading the web but is asking AI instead? What if that means new stuff isn't put on the web? Then AI has nothing more to scrape and train off of? Could AI herald its own demise?

CFP: swpaca.org Annual Conference ; Submit by October 31, 2025; New in 2025: an area for “AI & Culture”. Please consider submitting and also please forward to any you think might be interested. Thanks! #swpaca26 @swpaca.bsky.social

What if AI is good at some things that humans enjoy doing, but AI can do it better? And if AI can do it cheaper? Those things just become hobbies. What if AI forces us to live lives where all we do is our hobbies? As long as we can thrive and not just survive.

I think we need to stop calling them “hallucinations” and just call them “mistakes”. That might make the discourse about dealing with them a little easier.

In his new book, Daniel Yon explains how our brain is constantly constructing reality

“Graceful degradation” is a design philosophy that we apply to web pages so they will still work on older browsers. What if we applied it to urban planning so the structures would still work if/when the population declines?

The phrase “interdependence of all existence” has been so used as to become cliche. I propose a new one to hit home better: “inter-existence of all”

www.latimes.com/business/sto... - if you haven’t seen this already, you may find it interesting

We say “saving” and “loading” when it comes to games, but we don’t (usually) use their counterparts “restoring” and “unloading”. Take a moment and think about why.

Thought some of you might find this of interest: www3.raspberrypi.org/webmail/8009...

This little rhetorical twist shaped modern thinking: If instead of calling it "The Law of Gravity" & "The Law of Motion", we called it "The God of Gravity" & "The God of Motion", with children such as "The Demigod of Orbits". The striking impact of monotheism on modern scientific understanding.

We're hiring an "Executive Director of the Institute of Applied AI"! Please check out the link here, don't be afraid to comment and/or DM me with any questions, and also feel free to forward to anyone else you think might be interested! minnstate.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Minnes...

"You don't train for a marathon by getting in your car and driving 10 miles a day" - quote regarding use of AI from www.eventbrite.com/e/alondra-ne...

There comes a time when there is nothing more to say, nothing more to think - it is merely a time for action. But to think that it is that time, to say that it is that time, is proof that it is not. Wishful thinking does not make it so.

If corporations get humans to use AI more, then humans have more time to be consumers, benefiting corporations. Until eventually humans run out of credit, can’t afford basic necessities, and die. Then corporations pivot to a B2B-only world. The end of the Anthropocene era awaits. Corporacene arises.

All of human history can be seen as a slow transformation from a co-op PvE into a competitive PvP.

CFP: swpaca.org Summer Salon; Submit by April 15, 2025; New this year: an area for “AI & Culture”. Please consider submitting and also please forward to any you think might be interested. Thanks!

When most of human life was a struggle against the environment, our innate drives served us well. But in “winning” the struggle we lost the purpose of our innate drives: they helped us against our environment, but now the only environment to struggle against was our own social environment.

As the moon gets closer to the sun in the sky, we see less of it (crescent versus full). Perhaps this was the original inspiration for the story of Icarus?

If we continue to focus on making things easy to understand, do we not encourage only understanding simple things?

You have heard it said “be the change you want to see in the world.” But I say, if you see too much change in the world, be the opposite: safe, stable, tranquil peace.

So much goes back to the pandemic. I think the pandemic brought humanity together in ways we had never seen before. And I think the enemies of togetherness got scared because of that and plotted their revenge.

How often do we realize when we are speaking from a position of privilege? A check: if I were the one being disadvantaged by this, would I feel the same way? And be genuine, as sometimes answers are merely rationalizations and don’t engage actual emotional imagination.

“So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” ‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭13‬:‭13‬ ‭RSV‬‬

I wonder if this is the world’s oldest existing purse.

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” ‭‭Proverbs‬ ‭22‬:‭6‬ ‭RSV‬‬

Woolly mice. Almost woolly mammoth.

Nanotech based electrochemical decomposition of PFAS (forever chemicals) could revolutionize our treatment and handling of them: spectrum.ieee.org/pfas-busting...

This is funny.

What could possibly go wro… oh why do I bother?

Perhaps we should be applying the concept of heterochrony in sociological contexts, as in group development heterochrony as contributing to social dysfunction of certain groups. I say this because “enlightened self-interest” seems to not be as applicable to group behavior as it used to be.

People create powerful images of the struggle they see; then life imitates art

Very simply: together beat the hearts of mother and child within

Spread hope about good things. Take action to help people believe in what is hoped for. Iterate. Refine. Grow and lift up those around you.

“Take care of the land and the land will take care of you” - Maya belief, paraphrased, found in presentation by Lauren Griego, Eastern New Mexico University at #swpaca25

Hearing about centerfornewsliteracy.org here at #swpaca25 / @swpaca.bsky.social - stuff worth coming back to

Just saw ldumin157.com present here at #swpaca25 / @swpaca.bsky.social - time well spent

Just saw a presentation by rebeccadupontphd.com at @swpaca.bsky.social #swpaca25 - totally worth considering what she has to say about AI

👉Come to the first annual MN+CS Conference happening on April 11-12th in Minneapolis. Check out the schedule of events for this weekend full of learning, connecting and fun! More information about the conference and how to attend can be found on the - minnesota.csteachers.org

Looking forward to the swpaca.org conference starting tomorrow and will be using the #swpaca25 tag for stuff related to it.

Artwork found on hotel bathroom wall. Ignore the location- admire the detail. Yet the wood on this is real - was nature just as much of an artist as the human who put the pieces together?

One of the most interesting new research in the LLM space: introducing Large Language Diffusion Models. arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09992

We went from the Age of Information, to the Age of Attention. We're going from the Age of Attention to the Age of Rationality: Rational capacity is the rare thing to be fought over, like how ads fight for attention. In this battle, I see some employing scorched-earth tactics.

Announcing the release of Common Corpus 2. The largest fully open corpus for pretraining comes back better than ever: 2 trillion tokens with document-level licensing, provenance and language information. huggingface.co/datasets/Ple...

Some phrases are timeless. Sometimes what is timely is how close some feel to each other at a given moment. At this moment, for me it is a juxtaposition of “this too will pass” and “to thine own self be true”.

As we think of how to get out of any mess we are in, the following verse comes to mind: “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” ‭‭Matthew‬ ‭7‬:‭7‬ ‭RSV‬‬