We played a gig yesterday with Paper Knife at Hafenbahnhof in Hamburg. It was a great night! www.youtube.com/watch?v=n98N...

I watched a bunch of AI sessions at the WEF so you wouldn’t have to. But you should read this.

Song of the day: some great Irish music! Let's take another round www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhjZ...

Peer review is becoming highly demotivating due to AI generated papers. While waisting more of my time, I increasingly have the tendency to just decline review requests.

What a great music! Made in Germany www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQul...

Join the webinar on Continuity funding for research and innovation, on January 7, 4pm CET. Message me for a link! Continuity funding is an alternative to current R&I funding focused on competitive projects, instead supporting sustainable science. Read more: news.dyne.org/rethinking-r...

The irony of machine learning turning into this GenAI monstrosity is that it would be wonderful to have a tutor who can check my work while I self-learn at times when teachers need sleep. Instead GenAI is not only disenfranchising educators, but creating "diseducation" systems for experts.

🌟 Work With Us! 🌟 Stellen im DFG-Projekt „Prädiktives Wissen ist Macht: Ethik und Recht kollektiver Privatheit“: ▶️ 1x 75% Ph.D.-Stelle in Rechtswissenschaften (@hannahruschemeier.bsky.social) ▶️ 1x 100% Postdoc-Stelle in Philosophie (Rainer Mühlhoff). Alles Infos: 👉 purposelimitation.ai/dfg-project/

Really glad to see this out! @apsmolenska.bsky.social and I give our account for @boell.de of why the future of the dollar is also crucial for climate policy

There’s a growing & deeply problematic tendency to use #genAI for political and historical education Take this example from Germany, which translates as: «Hey AI, who should I vote for.» What’s typical here is that AI is not only addressed as pseudo-person but also as a kind of impartial judge 1/

First experience of having to review an AI generated 'academic' paper... how bleak.

Research and innovation funding in Europe is broken. But, there is an alternative! Together with @jaromil.bsky.social I'm working on an idea for continuity funding, for long-term, sustainable, and non-precarious R&I Check it out here: news.dyne.org/rethinking-r...

I note this one in particular.

Want a simple foundation from which to understand confusing topics like trade deficits, tariffs, and stablecoins? Check out my new video where I explain the international monetary system in under 15 minutes www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRHT...

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

New post 🚨 The Risk of More Reliable AI briandavidearp.substack.com/p/the-risk-o... -- Maybe hallucinations are good?

A typical financial market has *fundamental* traders who watch the world and *technical* traders who watch other traders. A striking feature of the Bitcoin market is the almost total absence of the former. This has increasingly serious implications for all of us www.asomo.co/p/the-whale-...

🤖 In other news, it seems all those influencers telling you your workplace HAS to get on the AI bandwagon or will be left behind don't wholly know what they're talking about. fortune.com/2025/08/18/m...

This is in the replies and it demonstrates a real issue which is if you find profundity from an AI, you’re responding to something profound a human being wrote that was vacuumed up and what ends up happening is you thank AI and not only don’t thank the person, you have no idea they were involved

Many EU member states are arguing for forcing WhatsApp to inspect all our photos w/AI. If the AI is in any “doubt” if it might be child pornography, your photo, location & other details get reported to Europol and a local police force. This is a terrible plan: berthub.eu/articles/pos... #chatcontrol

Das sechsteilige Feature "Tech Bro Topia" über die Ideologien der Tech-Milliardäre (von Musk bis Andreessen, vom Longtermism bis zum #eacc) ist nun online @deutschlandfunk.de.web.brid.gy. Es war eine Freude, dabei zu sein – vielen Dank für die Einladung: www.deutschlandfunk.de/tech-bro-top...

I've just tried Google's NotebookLM and though I've never been too impressed by ChatGPT and the like, this seems to change a lot. It can write original papers, grant applications, you name it; accurately because it only cross-references the texts you add. How to deal with this?

In what kind of world do we live when we are not even sure whether billionaires exists or not??? Source: Forbes newsletter.

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

De UvA rolt nu de 'eigen' AI Chat uit. Alle medewerkers hebben nu toegang, studenten binnenkort ook. Inclusief UvA-logo's voor vertrouwelijke feel. Het wordt echt een drama, hele simpele feitelijke vragen (bijv. wat staat in artikel 25(1) van de DSA) leveren meermaals totaal foutieve output op.

This is very funny. futurism.com/companies-fi...

In a horrifying article about the dangers of Teslas, one point stands out: Teslas automatically disengage self-driving mode <1 second before an imminent crash--not enough time for the driver to react, but enough for Tesla to deny responsibility for fatal crashes, since self-driving "wasn't engaged."

Joe Rogan talking with Bernie Sanders is strangely heart warming. They genuinely make an effort to bridge ideological differences to have a meaningful conversation. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYVz...

But arguably shadow money for shadow banks: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Having a bit of a Trump appreciation moment, what's going on?

The problem with the idea of "stochastic parrot" is that, while it denies the (false) claim that Ai is something like a human being, it leaves the door open for the (false) claim of it being something like an animal.

if you don't have kids, you might not know there is currently a massive global Luddite social movement stirring around smartphones and kids. in the Netherlands, parents of over 45,000 kids have signed anti-phone pledges www.nytimes.com/2025/06/18/o...

At the University of Lucerne, there is an open PhD position in Philosophy within the new Zug Institute for Blockchain Research. The application deadline is on 20 June. For full details, see: tinyurl.com/45huzpek

What is "Positive Luddism" and how can it help us rethink the political relationship we have with technology? I tried to answer this question in the great Doing Digital Utopia Glossary, co-organised by @annanosthoff.bsky.social and @fmaschewski.bsky.social doing-digital-utopia.de/artikel/posi...

Just stumbled upon a paper that I can't believe has actually been published: www.nature.com/articles/s41... It's good to have a nuanced view on this complicated heritage, but this paper is completely apologetic, even in its title, for indeed a great scientist that supported a lethal idea.

Whoever is doing an ethnography of AI talk on Reddit must be having a complete field day. There are so many gems of discussions on there.

👀 arxiv.org/abs/2505.13775

Eric Schmidt: AI will be able to solve the most complex problems! Also Eric Schmidt: let's build a narrative - you are mr. Good, I am mr. Bad...

For the #GigWorkPodcast, I was interviewed by @martijnarets.bsky.social about my latest book “Waiting for Robots. The Hired Hands of Automation” (U. Chicago Press). youtu.be/0oRkW9_Gz54 We spoke for 1 hour 15 minutes and 15 seconds—every instant counts.

I have the sense that a lot of AI research, being funded by big tech, is becoming similar to tobacco companies researching lung disease and oil companies researching climate change. It's hard to not take positive views with a huge grain of salt.

"turning a big dial taht says 'Racism' on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right"

Great piece on cryptomercantilism; echoing a lot of what @brettscott.bsky.social wrote about. www.suerf.org/publications...

Wie man Elon Musk stoppen kann: in unserer aktuellen Digitalkolumne @tazfuturzwei.bsky.social schreiben Maxim Keller, @fmaschewski.bsky.social und ich darüber, wie eine demokratische Antwort auf die gegenwärtigen technikautoritären Tendenzen aussehen könnte: dl.taz.de/taz/shop/dow...

More author copies arrived.. this time it’s Introduction to the Ethics of Emerging Technologies with Wessel Reijers Reijers and Mark T. Young Hope colleagues will find it useful for teaching!

Tomorrow is the deadline!! 🌟

Unser (m. @fmaschewski.bsky.social) Artikel @blaetter.bsky.social über Elon Musks DOGE, Löschen als Regierungsprogramm und den phantasmagorischen Feldzug gegen das "Woke Mind Virus" ist nun online und frei verfügbar: www.blaetter.de/ausgabe/2025...

„This is the AI jobs crisis“ — and how Staatsmodernisierung should not be done #digitalministerium

New book with Wessel Reijers and Mark T. Young! link.springer.com/book/10.1007...