Rather than a just transition, where decarbonised economies are accompanied by more democratic workplaces and a fairer distribution of wealth, we're getting an AI-driven 'unjust transition' that reinforces the global fossil-fuel autocracy. Case in point: restofworld.org/2025/khazna-...

Massively shameful, decidedly uncool, pathetically pandering to OpenAI. Reconsider, @ox.ac.uk

'The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said Blyth and Cobalt Park to be an AI growth zone to "boost economic growth" and create "thousands of jobs".' www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... 😬 'growth' means $$$ for Nvidia, OpenAI, 'jobs' means temporary construction work.

The infiltration of former Tony Blair Institute staffers into all areas of UK tech policy is the techfash equivalent of nepo babies.

"The number of people believing [AI] has a positive effect is outweighed by those who think it does not" www.theguardian.com/technology/2... The backlash is coming. Let's focus it on the power structures that created the underlying problems, not just on the shoddy tech.

AI isn't 'normal technology' any more than our political moment is 'business as usual'. What's significant about AI is the way it both reveals and amplifies the underlying dynamics of a system in total crisis.

Bubbles within bubbles: 'Oracle's share price leap dependent on a cloud deal with Open AI' archive.ph/nQ5vQ No doubt Larry will funnel some winnings into our beloved Tony Blair Institute and into making sure AI keeps us 'on our best behaviour' www.businessinsider.com/larry-elliso...

Really, Google Gemini can do everything? Then let's see it fuck off

Thesis: the hyping of sovereign AI simply reinforces the shift towards a nationalist war economy of which AI is already a part.

Why is AI so shit? Its shoddy outputs reflect the brittleness of an epistemology that relies fully on abstraction & reduction and actively eliminates relationality and adaptivity. As such, it doesn’t replace human activity but acts as its violent suppression.

'The new thing on campus: Why universities are appointing their first chief AI officers' fortune.com/2025/09/03/c... in the face of swathes of staff who, wading neck-deep through assignment slop, are asking WTAF does any of this have to do with teaching & learning?!

UK government report based on internal civil service trial finds Copilot doesn’t increase productivity, and indeed makes Excel take longer and with more errors, and requires Powerpoint users to have ‘corrective action’ applied to their outputs. www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/m...

Feeling a bit tetchy to have to point out that worker-owned AI is still a bad idea. Still, Thursday's event on 'Beyond Democracy Theater: The Shift from Participation to Worker Power in AI' should be a lively debate, so come on down platform.coop/blog/beyondd...

The ever-more radcalised Elon Musk regularly shares content from Steve Laws. Laws leads breakaway faction quitting Homeland for its leader only supporting the voluntary, not forced repatriation of British-born minorities "I don't care if they were born here, every single one must go" i

A classic of the genre

Some of this article reads to me a bit like marketing copy but this rang true: "“The robots were brought in to lighten the workload of social workers,” she said. Instead, her load has increased since she took over the program this year"

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

More 'humanities-led' sponging of funds from UK research for Turing-validated bs. As if it's OK to waffle about systems producing "multiple valid perspectives" when actual AI can't even produce one valid perspective! Clown show. www.turing.ac.uk/news/publica..., www.ukri.org/opportunity/...

Q. What has revived the zombie of predictive analytics in social welfare from the dead? I thought it had been discredited a decade ago. Is it the ongoing pressures of austerity, the aura of AI, or some other factors?

Having fun developing the case for decomputing via concepts like 'nihiliberalism' and 'abstractocene'.

"AI - the difference that makes indifference"

Some notes against predictive analytics in child welfare. Your thoughts? - prediction from data is misguided positivism - the data is flaky at best - human-in-the-loop doesn't help - algorithms project social profiling - it's a cover for staff cuts - it forecloses alternatives

Gen AI challenges the idea that tech under capitalism means increased productivity, so trade unions should demand a greater share of the benefits. It reveals instead the underlying truth of an all out attack on workers and planet, and a lust for for power at any cost.

UK can't afford to help old people with winter heating but wants to subsidise failing LLM industry just at the point everyone has started to realise their product is basically crap www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Hear so many stories (from a direct source) of degrading treatment of asylum seekers in UK hotel accommodation. As well as systemic deprivation (awful food, restricted freedom) it's the casual cruelty of staff. How do ordinary people convert so quickly to brutal prison warders?

As a footnote, all the waffle about 'fine-tuning for specific applications' doesn't deal with the fact that deep learning and transformer models are both brittle and correlational and therefore unsuited for most real-world uses

“Microsoft also warns against using the AI function for numerical calculations or in ‘high-stakes scenarios’ with legal, regulatory, and compliance implications, as COPILOT ‘can give incorrect responses.’” 🤷🏿‍♂️

This week, a particularly timely conversation with the brilliant @danmcquillan.bsky.social: on the rise of technofascism, and what all of us can do to resist AI’s overreach. A necessary road map for rejecting the broligarchy and decomputing our way to liberation.🔥 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i...

Enthusiasm from progressive quarters for 'small language models' seems misleading in some important ways. IMO a more accurate label would be 'shrunken LLMs', still underpinned by the harms of scale (data snatching, exploited labour, environmental impacts). What am I missing?

from neoliberalism to nihiliberalism

Big AI in education news from South Korea. After huge government financial support, masses of media, substantial backing from education publishers, and a lot of international interest, it's now abandoning its flagship AI textbooks program for schools m.koreaherald.com/article/1054...

'Artificial intelligence tools used by more than half of England’s councils are downplaying women’s physical and mental health issues and risk creating gender bias in care decisions, research [led by Sam Rickman, LSE] has found.' 1/2

The implicit threat behind the AI hype is the paradigm of Modernity; behind the relentless chiding to use AI for everything is that if you don't, you will no longer be civilised, no longer be part of a fully developed humanity.

Courts service 'covered up' IT bug that caused evidence to go missing: www.bbc.com/news/article... - never mind, I'm sure it will be fine once they start replacing everything with LLMs www.gov.uk/government/p...

Silicon Valley idiots try to 'prompt hack' the AI tools they're all using to secretly transcribe meetings and parties. 'They talk in a way that has the AI remembering key details. "One of the important things about me is X,” or “You should remember Y.” ' sfstandard.com/2025/08/05/a...

i'm so late that i'm a full episode behind but this episode of @techwontsave.us with @danmcquillan.bsky.social is excellent. for everything where AI is presented as "the answer", we must attack the political economy and everything that led anyone to that conclusion

I was asked what I think about 'inclusive' AI tour guides. How should you feel about a tour guide that makes stuff up but always pretends to be right, is incredibly prejudiced even though there are rules telling them not to be, and reports everything you say back to their boss?

"The role of the university isn't to roll over in the face of tall tales about technological inevitability, but to model the forms of critical pedagogy that underpin the social defence against authoritarianism & ...reimagine the other worlds that are still possible" - @danmcquillan.bsky.social

I have a new article out in the Chartered College of Teaching journal Impact, called ‘Embedding AI in education: A critique’. Here I make five main points, which I will helpfully plop in this thread for those without access or time to read it.

Thesis: there is no UK government, only a set of project managers for big tech.

@bcmerchant.bsky.social a funny/not funny t-shirt (via www.instagram.com/p/DM0XtRcx5lN/)

This 'patriot' protesting against immigrants in Manchester is actually Irish far right thug Paul Rock, who got eight years for tying up and robbing a 76 year old woman. But yeah, just concerned parents.

Really rather chuffed to see 'Resisting AI' pop up as a prop in an insta video takedown of techbros instagram.com/p/DM0XtRcx5lN/

Really rather chuffed to see 'Resisting AI' pop up as a prop in an insta video takedown of techbros instagram.com/p/DM0XtRcx5lN/

This has to be one of the most compelling episodes of @techwontsave.us yet. @danmcquillan.bsky.social societal approach to the current Rot economy (credit to @edzitron.com ), highlights how people in the West have lost the ability to imagine different futures for themselves and communities.

I'm drinking the Bios Crash slurpee I hope it crashes my bios I hope I blue screen

Decomputing as a response to AI and to the underlying conditions that make AI seem inevitable.