Many Indian AI researchers are now willing to take a "50% sacrifice today for the greater pot at the end" by leaving Silicon Valley for homegrown startups https://restofworld.org/2026/silicon-valley-status/?utm_campaign=row-social&utm_source=bluesky

"A record-shattering drought has racked much of the US. But the artificial intelligence industry is pushing ahead regardless, with the majority of planned datacenters set to be built in drought-ridden locations, a Guardian analysis has found."

As we transition towards greater use of energy intensive compute, more questions will be asked about the social utility of those using systems. This is yet another steer towards more industrial coordination through transition. media.licdn.com/dms/document...

People (and their employers who are introducing SaaS and Agentic Solutions that allow foundation models to access structured workplace data) are still very much part of refining models. We need to focus on the Value Chain and role of Workplace Data. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Both shocking and unsurprising. What’s truly troubling is how many people have likely already produced, published and relied upon ‘insights’ they assumed came from analysis of their data but were in fact just the usual stereotyped LLM guesses

What does productivity mean in the age of AI? @bartvanark.bsky.social spoke w/ @dianecoyle1859.bsky.social about why traditional economic measures misses the impact of digital tech & intangible assets & why measurement matters for productivity: podfollow.com/productivity... @bennettschool.cam.ac.uk

Next a conversation on tech and democracy - while we know about the impact in civic life, what does AI at mean for democracy at work? With Professor Simon Deakin, Cambridge; Professor Abigail Marks, Newcastle, Professor Will Jennings, Southampton. #MakingTheFutureWork @ifow.org

Great to have Sir Patrick Vallance on stage for our first Keynote at #MakingTheFutureWork conference @ifow.org

Scientific literature depends on the integrity of its references. In a new research letter, authors present the findings of a reference-integrity audit of 2.5 million biomedical papers. Read this & more in our latest issue: spkl.io/63325A7eXP

As someone sitting here with 3 reviews I wish I'd said no to , big 💯. Publishers need to pay for basic due diligence pre peer review.

For years, Europe assumed foreign investment would naturally generate industrial upgrading. The Industrial Accelerator Act marks a shift. @aleichthammer.bsky.social & I argue its FDI conditionality targets a real issue, but is currently too weak to solve it 🧵 www.delorscentre.eu/en/publicati...

📣 The Institutional Challenge (14:00 - 14:50) Chair: Dr Abby Gilbert @agkg1.bsky.social (IFOW) Panellists: - Bart van Ark (The Productivity Institute) - Mary Jones (DSIT) - Jeremias Adams-Prassl (@ox.ac.uk) Sign-up below!

Right now, concerns about AI and work are narrowly on web-scraped data; the creative industries, and copyright. But AI is no longer just trained before deployment on web-scraped data It’s also learning after deployment, from workplace data. This is 'post-deployment training'.

Foundation Models have changed the game in terms of what is possible codifying work methods. While we can debate (a) what 'intelligence' is (b) the scale of disruption What history reliably tells us is that access to data underpins developments in inferential power.

⚠️New Report Alert⚠️ Economic Sovereignty and the Question of Post-Deployment Training AI sovereignty is about who captures the value from worker and organisational know how codified in workplace data. This presents a risk not only to workers, but also firms and nation states 🧵

Here's my first edit on the March 3rd Lunar Eclipse. 15 moon shots, 1 foreground. Taken over a 3 hourish period.

Addressing AI at work can be challenging. It touches on personal, professional, and political. Our work with @cwunews.bsky.social is designed to break down implications into actionable union responses. Read more from @adamc-c.bsky.social on phase 2 connectedbydata.org/blog/2026/0...

As AI and automation disrupt entry-level jobs, how can young people from low-income backgrounds access better work? In Youth Employment Week, we're excited to be publishing this research with the EY Foundation highlighting why internal motivation is so crucial: www.ifow.org/publications...

💬 The future of work: A manifesto for 2030 IFOW Co-Director @abbygkgilbert.bsky.social joined @isabelberwick.ft.com, Colette Stallbaumer and Christine Armstrong at the FT Women in Business Summit to explore how women work best, and what needs to be done to reshape how, where and why we work

Data centers could greatly reduce the strain they put on the grid by scaling down operations and lowering electricity use in less than 1% of all hours, so why don't they. In my Energy Institute post today, I dig into the need to improve incentives. energyathaas.wordpress.com/2025/04/14/c... 🔌💡

“While much of the world operates on a just-in-time supply model, China takes a different approach, hoarding vast reserves to protect against price swings, geopolitical tensions, and climate shocks.”

"When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order." Iya Prigogine, Noble prize-winning chemist

Important for all the irate lecturers trying to convince students that learning to write compellingly, alone, still matters

What are immersive technologies? Our new explainer provides a shared vocabulary by summarising the main types of these technologies, including what makes them ‘immersive’. www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/resource/imm...

A well-paid, four-year PhD position in political theory/philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, to work primarily with my wonderful colleagues Lillian Cicerchia and Paul Raekstad, and also a bit with yours truly. werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

With Apple pulling the plug on at-rest end-to-end encryption in the UK, and Signal threatening to pull out of Sweden if that government demands special access, it's looking bleak Governments can't seem to stop asking for secret backdoors. New opinion piece here www.theregister.com/2025/03/03/o...

🎧 What happens when a key US intelligence watchdog loses its independent oversight? This episode unpacks Trump’s firing of PCLOB members, the lawsuit announced last week, and what it means for privacy, surveillance, and US-EU data relations. Featuring interviews with Travis LeBlanc and Greg Nojeim:

"The competitions do not actually ask machines to perform human tasks; it’s more accurate to say that they ask humans to behave in machine-like ways as they perform lifeless simulacra of human tasks." 🔥

“Self-determination of national or cultural communities requires regulative structures at the supranational level strong enough to secure relations of equal integration into the global community and protect local communities from exploitation, expropriation and excursion”

Compelling & timely paper stating the case for a politics which recognises the primacy of the nation state, and it’s allocative autonomy (determining relations of production&distribution) while also working towards a democratically integrated global system.

NEW First of three papers in a major study from @nprcoxford.bsky.social and @jrf-uk.bsky.social. TLDR - The credibility of all political parties in tackling household economic insecurity looks set to be one of the crucial dividing lines of the parliament. www.theguardian.com/business/202... 1/

In partnership with @schmidtsciences.bsky.social, @simonhrjohnson.bsky.social, David Autor and I are seeking funding proposals from researchers conducting innovative field experiments on the labor economics of frontier AI. Expressions of interest due March 31. shapingwork.mit.edu/call-for-pro...

Just seeing the RCT 'scandal' brewing among econs again. This is not a question about some bad apples or some instances of malpractice. The RCT industry has been completely distorted from its inception in Econ and this is closely tied to the incentive structure of the discipline.

This seems like a ridiculous gambit when our huge tech firms don’t have a technological advantage, they just have a user base

Publishers suing AI startup for ©️ and TM infringement?? Reputational harm stemming from being linked as fictional articles. Now only if ©️ authors could rely on [artistic] reputational harm for being used for training AI models. How the pendulum swings. www.worldtrademarkreview.com/article/inac...

Twinkle, twinkle, little Starlink: my Trade Secrets today. Countries are scrambling to set up their own satellite systems rather than depend on geopolitical foes. It's all part of the politicisation of the plumbing of the world economy.

DeepSunk

1. Background to the epochal change in German and European politics after the election. Merz, the presumed next Chancellor has said that Europe is setting out to "achieve its independence from the US, step by step." @abenewman.bsky.social and I explain the background in our book, Underground Empire

Big AI steps taken at NY Times. But also clear no go’s, like 1) AI to draft or significantly revise an article, 2) input third party copyrighted materials, 3) use AI to circumvent a paywall, 4) publish machine-generated images or videos, only with proper labeling www.semafor.com/article/02/1...

Our Co-Director, @abbygkgilbert.bsky.social, is in Oslo for their #AISummit, and has shared this this morning from one of the sessions. Important to understand what the human implications are for co-working with AI tools. As they present themselves as more 'intelligent', do we abdicate discretion?

Our Co-Director, @abbygkgilbert.bsky.social is still in Paris attending #AIActionSummit. This afternoon, she will be supporting the setting up of a new global network of AI labs at the Initiating the AI@Work labs network (INRIA) workshop. www.elysee.fr/en/sommet-po...

NEW POLL: 51% of American voters polled say they disapprove of Donald Trump’s performance so far as President; 40% strongly disapprove: www.pewresearch.org/politics/202...

Fully funded PhD studentship: Compositional and Holistic UNits of Knowledge in Sentences at @exeter.ac.uk With Rodrigo Wilkens and @marcoidiart.bsky.social Start Date: September 2025 Application Deadline: 10 February 2025 www.exeter.ac.uk/study/pg-res... and www.exeter.ac.uk/v8media/recr...

DeepSeek’s R1 model is challenging the very foundations of the past two years of generative AI hype, wiping $1 trillion of the value of major US tech companies. But it’s also another example that the US strategy to try to contain Chinese tech is failing — and pushing them to get even more creative.

For our second session at #MakingTheFutureWork on the 27th of January, hear from Dr @abbygkgilbert.bsky.social Gilbert, Professor James Hayton, Kate Bell, and Bomi Okuyiga as they discuss how businesses can adapt to the rapid pace of socio-technical change.

We're bringing together scholars, practitioners, artists, and activists to reflect, critique, and imagine the manifold ways that digital, physical, and social infrastructures are built, broken, reconstructed, and mythologized. Learn more and apply by January 17, 2025! datasociety.net/announcement...

Great to take part in this and see this important work out. Looking forward to more from Yasmin, and JRF on this.