"AI’s power must not be allowed to hollow out the very skills required to navigate an AI age successfully." After six months of writing and research, my white paper on AI and pedagogy is finally out! sagepub.com/explore-our-... Do share; do join the conversation.

Saw @tomchatfield.bsky.social last week, and he gave me a sneak peek at his forthcoming book ‘How To Think Clearly’, where he’d pointed to my #cognitivedebt coinage from earlier this year. So I have written a proper page laying out the thinking, examples etc… smithery.com/cognitive-de...

I've spent the last six months writing and researching this white paper about why our greatest challenges are human, not technological. Do take a look. www.sagepub.com/explore-our-...

Missed our webinar on AI and academic excellence? Catch up on the discussion with Dr. Leo Lo & Dr. Tom Chatfield & discover how to turn AI into a collaborative tool for research while maintaining critical thinking & ethical standards. Watch now: ow.ly/5aYV50VgkTF @tomchatfield.bsky.social

Video from our 'Libraries and AI' panel is now online! www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsRk... Thanks @britishlibrary.bsky.social @cawston.bsky.social @suelacey-bryant.bsky.social @tomchatfield.bsky.social @timandraharkness.bsky.social, Maja Maricevic and Svein Arne #AIDebates

A newsletter on the usefulness of hasty, heartfelt writing; plus some suitably speedy thoughts on AI, critical thinking and the future of literature. open.substack.com/pub/tomchatf...

"If you think you might have something to contribute, don’t you have some kind of duty to move forward at 70%, instead of depriving us of your contribution thanks to your finicky and frankly rather self-indulgent insistence on perfection?" ckarchive.com/b/wvu2hghk5m...

Perfection, of a kind.

First glimpses of Wise Animals in its paperback incarnation, out on 13th February. Please do consider picking one up! I'm very proud of this book. www.panmacmillan.com/authors/tom-...

I'm looking forward to an excellent panel at @britishlibrary.bsky.social 's #AIDebates on 'Libraries and AI' on Thursday, with @suelacey-bryant.bsky.social @cawston.bsky.social @tomchatfield.bsky.social @sveinarne.bsky.social and Svein Arne Brygfjeld thebritishlibrary.seetickets.com/event/librar...

Given that AIs will in due course be trained upon all the papers currently being written about AI—including about ethics, deception and alignment, and how to test and explore such things—is there a genuine risk that today's scholarship will help improve tomorrow's automated manipulators?

Very much looking forward to this: do join us!

there is so much hype around AI agents, but like most current AI, they spectacularly fail when put to actual real-world use www.answer.ai/posts/2025-0...

Crept into new days, Dodging old futures, sly looks From rickety dreams.

Stage Hamlet in a game of GTA and it’s all “⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ brilliant cross-fertilisation of genres, reimagining dramatic possibilities in the C21st” - but play GTA during a staging of Hamlet, and suddenly it’s “you have to leave now, Sir: you’re disturbing the performance…”

A moral milestone. My children are old enough to have learned the golden rule: do unto others whatever they'll let you get away with.

The notion that we may be glimpsing the nature and properties of a multiverse via quantum computation is rather beautiful blog.google/technology/r... the most fundamental informational properties of existence as we know it, shedding light on its unimagined other echoes

Front-line reportage from the school Christmas fair's darker peripheries...

Coffee, to prevent that murmur, soon replies: "Lift doors opening. Going up."

NEW: I spoke to Gaia Vince about her book on the coming climate upheaval - and how cities and infrastructure will have to change. www.thereengineer.pro/p/we-have-to...

Morning tea brewing: A rope ladder dangled down The deep well of sleep.

@tomchatfield.bsky.social : "The UK’s creative industries generate over £124.6 billion annually not because they churn out content to order, but because they entail hundreds of thousands of people creating works that audiences love."

Confirmation bias can sound so (laughably!) easy to avoid. And yet. To carefully ask what the evidence does and does not show, and how and why, is not only hard but can also be painful and thankless. So much simpler first to pick your side, then your story, then your evidence.

The season's sweet mulch Rots into a thousand lives. Hope, but not for you.

I'm very much looking forward to discussing Wise Animals with the great Adam Rutherford this Saturday afternoon in Hay. If you're there, do come! www.hayfestival.com/p-22707-tom-...

“… The promise of ‘human-in-the-loop’ approaches sits awkwardly alongside AI’s central selling point: scalability.” @felixsimon.bsky.social reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/neither... I would add: Sometimes it is quicker to write from scratch than it is to fact check AI output.

Easy to overlook the simple fact that people are above all interested in other people and even the choicest AI-generated content won't sustain a platform of engaged, curious humans. In the short term, people are easily duped. In the long term they get wise (and bored, and angry).

Miles slip past my feet Like a younger life lived well. There, almost in sight!

A sudden, sad thought that we may end up looking at today's LLMs like this if, rather than the mad/flaky/amazing business of chatting to them to try to work out what on earth they can (and can't) do we end up with endless streams of templates and productivity-enhancing tools doing pseudo work for us

ICYMI, an extract from Wise Animals, which came out in Feb and explores our co-evolution with technology. "To love something is to be obliged to worry about its history, purposes and imperfections; to want it to be better; to say no as well as yes to its offerings." open.substack.com/pub/tomchatf...

"I have never understood why, when everyone on the planet is one accident or medical condition away from disability, many people seem to lack any empathy and do not attempt to understand how it must feel to be refused service because of a disability." www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I love this writing teacher laying out her thoughts about AI in a Google Doc and inviting other teachers to jump in with comments. It feels very "let's struggle together" and not "I'm above the fray." Yes, it's good even if you want to take AI for a long walk on a short pier. :)

A summary of my current thoughts on AI disclosure and human-in-the-loop approaches in the news: both are widely touted solutions in news media, but would that it were so simple… Short thread below ⬇️ reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/neither...

It’s #WorldPhilosophyDay today, so why not listen to a few episodes of the Philosophy Bites podcast - over 300 to choose from on Spotify, Apple Podcasts etc podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/p...

A recording of the talk I gave in New York last week, exploring our co-evolution with technology—and how this deep past can help us think humanely about the current and future challenges of AI. www.linkedin.com/posts/tomcha...

Sarah Hrdy’s ‘Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies’ just arrived on my kindle 😊 If you’ve not read any of Hrdy’s books, then start today

So much to savour, as ever, in this latest newsletter from Michael Sacasas open.substack.com/pub/theconvi...

The late, great David Graeber asking what it might mean (or have meant) to rethink the post-pandemic world.

Dr Dog hopes you are having a marvelous day

A forest within a forest

Homeward bound

Glossy gorgeous starling, patrolling the crockery

Multi-storey carpark, NYC style...

A line that won't leave my head, from Hanif Kureishi's latest newsletter. "There is no longer anything ‘social’ about social media... Friends and family don’t post anymore. It’s all war and adverts for cheap clothes—like an Adam Curtis documentary." open.substack.com/pub/hanifkur...

I'm only a sporadic Substacker, but it's where I tend to share longer thoughts. This piece from a few months ago, on philosophy and everyday flourishing, is a personal favourite open.substack.com/pub/tomchatf...

A beautiful morning and a fresh start