This might be my villain origin story: www.wired.com/story/openai...

People are always saying on social media that gen-AI is here to stay and that it’s retrograde and standing in the way of progress if we reject it. But there are plenty of things that were once the embodiment of progress that we collectively decided to reject, from cocaine in soft drinks to eugenics

The hysteria when you say, “nah I’m good” on all the chat bots is how you know they’re in the grips of roulette fever. You know the guy at a casino, shaking at 2 am, telling you how dumb you are not to get in on this?

DOGE is assembling a master database of personal data from across the government -- including tax records, social security files, immigration dossiers etc. This cross-agency master database is exactly what Congress tried to prevent when it passed the Federal Privacy Act of 1974.

A centralized database will be "ill-equipped to correct errors, allow for extenuating circumstances, or bring facts up to date," warned Vance Packard. "The notion of the possibility of redemption is likely to be incomprehensible to a computer."

This consolidation started long before now and was a product of a lot of American hubris. But this is definitely the “find out” phase and it’s going to be brutal.

This is, the therapists say, very dangerous—the algorithm doesn't know how to detect nuance, or when to ask follow up questions, for instance, and may be turning away people in genuine crisis. Algorithmic triage, they say, has been a disaster, and they've fought it since its inception.

i'm ambivalent about litigating algorithmic fairness and accuracy; this is why. negotiating administrating this system fairly or accurately is nonsense. there's no running a colony ethically, or an empire in a human-centered way. you can make up bullshit and hit those targets, but they mean nothing.

After Trump was elected the first time, there was also a lot of talk about making iPhones in the US. At the time, I co-edited the sci-fi outlet Terraform, and asked @timmaughan.bsky.social to imagine what such a future might really look like. With his permission, I'm republishing the story in full:

Go slow and love intensely.

“Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Come this way…” —@adriennemareebrown.bsky.social

Erez Reuveni argued on behalf of the Justice Department during Friday’s hearing in the Abrego Garcia case. Reuveni has reportedly been placed on leave. Here’s one exchange with the judge that may have contributed to his ouster:

a pro life tip is to find someone you like to tell your dreams to

“Planning on co-liberation and collective thriving doesn’t mean things proceed according to a plan. It looks more like prioritizing, over and over again, the reality that while the future is unwritten, my destiny is tied up with yours— that all life is an interconnected web…

The hype machine for Big Tech, "AI", and cyberlibertarianism shows no sign of slowing down. This is because it actually has to speed up to balance the number of red lights flashing on the dashboard in terms of "AI's" usefulness, contribution to human happiness, and (crucially), profitability.

Holy shit “Trump administration attorneys told the court to dismiss the request on multiple grounds, including that Trump’s “primacy in foreign affairs’ outweighs the interests of Abrego Garcia and his family”

BREAKING: Trump admin says it mistakenly deported a Maryland father who had *withholding of removal* back to El Salvador on March 15. Govt told court Monday it won't bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back. "What.The.Fuck..." one govt attorney told me. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc... @theatlantic.com

Pro-AI hype and Anti-AI doom are so deeply personal and polarized for a reason: they are the only visions of the future anyone is offering at all. In my latest for @techpolicypress.bsky.social, a look at the loss of faith in participatory politics that frames AI hype, but also its backlash.

Setting them aside isn't the prescription, so I don't think we're that far off. Mostly I want to see a "future" without AI at the center. Most Gen AI use cases are inseparable from this techno-capitalist impulse. But others aren't. Giving up one because we don't like the other feels like a retreat.

Brilliant piece by @hannahstoryb.bsky.social here - the naive 'JUST BUILD THINGS' abundance agenda is a boon to the fossil fuel industry. prospect.org/culture/book...

There is a quasi-religion in Silicon Valley that views AI as godlike. This faith has always been parallel to Evangelical Christianity: salvation (transhumanism), the rapture (the technological singularity), and demons (Roko's Basilisk) Lately the AI faith has fully fused with Christian Nationalism.

The promise of AI in education is it will save educators time. That's rubbish. It's sapping all our time already in working groups, committees, workshops, and marking anxiety. It's the most time-sapping, exhausting and frankly boring thing I've ever encountered in HE - and it's in my research area.

despite popularised beliefs, LLMs are not fit for medical applications. SoTA models produce "non-trivial levels of hallucinations" even w inference techniques like CoT & search augmented generation: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05777 of surveyed clinicians, 53% use LLMs daily & 91% encountered hallucinations

[Looks terrific] "This conference aims to examine hype as a performative force, exploring its mechanisms, effects, and implications across different domains" hypestudies.org/conference

Just learned a lot about the egg cartel. Big egg is worth the read.

David Graeber once said “this feeling of hopelessness that everyone has is a manufactured product.” Today I’ve published a piece about how the future gets foreclosed and how we fight back with our minds and relationships.

Very excited to participate in this event with @randomwalker.bsky.social next week! lectures.princeton.edu/lectures/202...

In this post Kelly provides great list of easy steps you can take: sign the EveryLibrary petition, call your senators + reps (use 5Calls!). Protect our state libraries, tribal libraries, interlibrary loan, digital equity, vital grants to libraries of all species... 📣 And please spread the word!! 📣

“Denying the Seriousness of Long COVID Is Dangerous for Me – and You” On Long COVID Awareness Day, pleased to publish this piece for Zeteo from @juliadoubleday.bsky.social

We need mask mandates in healthcare settings more than ever

This is going to kill many public libraries, especially in rural areas. If you use a public library, you will be impacted. #imls is a dust mote in the federal budget. It also provides things like internet at your local library so people can apply for jobs and kids can do homework.

“‘The Trump administration has removed safety, fairness, misinformation, and responsibility as things it values for AI, which I think speaks for itself,’ says one researcher at an organization working with the AI Safety Institute, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.”

Oof.

Run for office. runforwhat.net - our next intro call is 3/25.

Unfortunately this piece I wrote in 2018 on the absolute nonsense in the middle of the AI narrative stands up uncomfortably well in 2025: medium.com/@michebox/th...

Futurist/Effective Altruist/Longtermist AI* hype men are essentially saying that we must sacrifice some part of humanity (but not them, of course) in order to "save" humanity through the building of an AI* god. If you think I'm exaggerating, have I got a reading list for you.

Designed and deployed under conditions of austerity, suspicion, and routine criminalization, fabricated pretext for state violence is a feature of predictive (text) models. As @ruha9.bsky.social has pointed out these are not glitches but rather glimpses of the way the system is intended to work.

🚨Last week Helyeh Doutaghi, a scholar in international law, was barred from Yale and put on administrative leave: ‘The decision came three days after a news site powered by artificial intelligence, published a story calling her a member of a terrorist group.’ www.removepaywall.com/search?url=h...

This is why so many of us have been working on systems of contestability and governance in digitally defined systems for so long. The perception of "data"s value is, itself, a weaponizable ambiguity that gets used to huge effect, whether it's right or wrong. It always has been.

We’re new here, and it seems like a good time to share radical independent media. Read our latest Murmurations column in @yesmedia.bsky.social : Climate Solutions Require Black Ecology Thanks @adriennemareebrown.bsky.social ! www.yesmagazine.org/environment/...

Have just watched Kevin @techtonicjustice.bsky.social speaking with CT lawmakers about AI with lots of good questions from citizens & man it feels good to glimpse functional civic engagement.

1) It makes up links 2) It makes up papers that it can cite 3) This means if you're doing your job properly, you have to check every single link and citation, which is slower than finding them yourself, because your process doesn't generate false positives Don't trust guessing machines.

"Each government’s attempt to define the rules either projects its policy globally or fragments what was once the common ground of some aspect of the internet." (from 2018) w/AX Mina for @foreignpolicy.com on #digitalpolitik 🙏@beijingpalmer.bsky.social foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/19/t...

New investigation by @apnews.com on the IDF's use of OpenAI models in Gaza. I spoke to them regarding this first confirmation of commercial foundation models being directly used in warfare and the implications of using highly error-prone AI for life or death determinations apnews.com/article/isra...

I was in Paris last week for the #AIActionSummit & was honoured to participate in the “AI in public interest” panel. 👇🏾 my thoughts & reflections on what AI in public interest is/isn’t & some concrete steps/initiatives for `bending the arc of AI towards the public interest' aial.ie/pages/aiparis/