David Fincher's THE SOCIAL NETWORK, and Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross's Oscar-winning score, turned 15 years old this fall. Here's some of my artwork for the album, created by manually corrupting images from the film by editing their raw hex data in a text editor, damaging them from the inside. 1/

A truly fantastic piece Ramon, I enjoyed the exchange enormously and argued back for the need to rescue intelligence from anti-human AI, it’s too important a notion to both human and non-human interactions with the world - see this rejoinder hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/c5hq3by1.... #philsci

🚨New paper! My response to @sabinaleonelli.bsky.social’s Environmental Intelligence. In short: maybe we should stop using ‘intelligence’ altogether and recognize these technical artifacts as what they are: epistemic technologies with new and distinct affordances. #AIEthics #Philsci #Philtech

Making flour tortillas at home is weird because—despite being so simple, making them makes me feel like I’ve achieved whatever level of enlightenment Sor Juana Inez de La Cruz wanted Aristotle to be at when she suggested he should’ve spent more time in the kitchen. #philsci

Strolling through the Stuttgart forest talking to atmospheric scientist, physicists, engineers, computer and data scientist about Machine Learning in science. Very interesting developments and considerations as we pondered discovery, knowledge transfer, and artifactual epistemology. #philsci

Download open source models, fine tune them or untune them with weird data, explore glitches and capabilities. Create local agents for garage projects, or like my friends say: make them feral. #philtech #AIethics

I found hanging out with artists and creatives helps transcend the whole “use or refuse” dichotomy and discourse. Sooo many interesting ways to appropriate this technology and push its limits and capabilities to take it into fascinating directions. Very similar to street art. #philtech #aiethics

Excited to be a keynote here. Talking about scientific discovery, serendipity and machine learning. www.simtech.uni-stuttgart.de/communicatio... #philsci

Flash trip back to Stuttgart to give a keynote on AI and scientific discovery. I’m really looking forward to the written version of this paper on serendipity, science, and computational methods. Hopefully by the end of Fall I’ll compile all the feedback from this year. #philsci

Speaking of Hinton, hate to say I told you so… Should we replace radiologists with deep learning? Pigeons, error and trust in medical AI - Alvarado - 2022 - Bioethics. #AI #AIethics #Philtech

Some of the knee-jerk resistance to understand the virtues and benefits of Artificial agents and caregivers is heavily culturally biased. In this paper, @smusab.bsky.social provides a broader #AIethics perspective. This is an excellent contribution to an otherwise stagnated discourse.

For ~2 years and I’ve been reading all I can about Francis Bacon as a #philsci and #philtech guy. One could read many more books about him without mentioning science, tech, or philosophy and it would all be as impressive. Definitely up there with Descartes and others. This summer’s readings!

Q&A in Noto, Sicily. For a seminar I gave for the University of Messina. Great group of researchers led by Nicola Angius in the Philosophy of Computer Science, Science and AI. #philsci #philtech

Update w/updated itinerary: 5 weeks, 4 countries, 10 cities, 7 talks, 1 panel. Week 2, talk 3 and panel participation at IACAP done. #philsci #philtech

So lucky I got to see @firepile.bsky.social twice elaborate on why she thinks “Hell is Other Robots”, specially ones that simply cant collaborate. Once at SPT and now at IACAP.

Next week I’ll give the META lecture at Politecnico di Milano on Serendipty, AI, and automated science. #philsci #philtech

As usual, an impressively thorough, philosophically cautious, yet thought-provoking talk by Emily Sullivan as keynote and recipient of IACAP’s Herbert Simon Award. #philsci #philtech

Two of my favorite ideas from SPT last week. I’m still processing: - @shannonvallor.bsky.social: intimacy as openness, current tech as closure of imaginaries. - @davidgunkel.bsky.social: the author we invented is dead, yes. But we’ll come up with something new.

5 weeks, 4 countries, 10 cities, 6 talks, 2 panels. Week one/first talk at the Society for the Philosophy of Technology, done! Doing different presentations of different papers for different expert audiences on #philtech, #philsci, and a bit of #AIethics as well! Living the dream :)

LLM’s sycophancy seems to me to be embedded in the data: we’ve normalized abusing words like “great”, we even call our interlocutors words and deeds as “awesome” and “amazing” in both the corporate and casual life even when they’re anything but that. #philtech #AIethics

Excellent opening keynote at PST by @sabinaleonelli.bsky.social. Thought-provoking messaging against AI hype in science. A bit lacking on #philsci that acknowledges successful ML use in hard sciences, but a needed corrective to sloppy general industry narratives. #philtech

RIP

RIP @helendecruz.net

Workaccount2 on Hacker News just coined the term "context rot" to describe the thing where the quality of an LLM conversation drops as the context fills up with accumulated distractions and dead ends news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4430...

I think this would be of great interest to folks in #philtech #AIethics #philsky #AI. Please share if you know of another community that would find this interesting.

Can we have close relationships with AI? In this new DatOS episode, Oluwaseun Sanwoolu walks us through her paper (w @johnfsymons.bsky.social) on why we are simply mistaken if we think we can. Hint: it’s our human limitations that make things special. youtu.be/2vw3XVZV4Ps?...

Paper is finally up and open access (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...), it's a sequel to an earlier paper where we'd argued that there's not good evidence that pre-publication peer review is a net benefit (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/...). So in this one we suggest an alternative.

I wrapped my Data/ #AIethics grad seminar with the liberating insights of Denisa Kera—from Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv—who showed us through her work (thinking and tinkering) that we don’t have to be passive victims of technology. Rather, we can decide our own level of involvement. #philtech

A few minutes ago I received the news that I have tenure. Celebrating with a brief moment of peace. #philsky

This week I gave an online lecture abt my research on #AIethics at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv. I’m always nervous about online lectures because I’m a walker/hand gesture speaker. But apparently I managed! This is one of the nicest comments I’ve ever received abt my talks. #philtech

Such an honor, privilege and pleasure to talk about my research on AI and values— mainly AI and Serendipity in Science, and AI and loneliness— to students and faculty in Tel Aviv at the "Critical Studies of Emergent Technologies" Masters Program of Bar Ilan University. #AIEthics #Philtech #Philsci

The responses to this post are perfect illustrations of how much affective polarization there is around LLM. For saying "I find LLMs useful in some limited contexts" people have decided that I: 1. Hate thinking (I'm a philosophy professor) 2. Don't know how to do research (again, professor)

Found some project details in alt text: Calculating Empires - A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500. Hence, no data presented on pre-medieval data collection calculatingempires.net?pos=6017.63%...

This week, our advanced data ethics/ #AIethics seminar heard from @smusab.bsky.social and some of his research on AI as social agents. Check out his great paper with @johnfsymons.bsky.social. #philtech

It does! Although I must say, a lot of philosophers of science (physics included) have degrees in the sciences. Whereas many of the philosophical statements from the sciences come with little to no training in philosophy, even at the undergraduate level. #philsci

I do think philosophy is fundamental to theoretical endeavors/empirical criteria in science. And that scientist can/should approach it more diligently and viceversa. But I’ve seen this ignorant element play out repeatedly in the sciences. Some w/o realizing they are making philosophical statements.

This is a great read but it should be titled “Theoretical physicists (and scientists in general) are terrible philosophers and have only read some bad philosophy of science—which is a fundamental aspect of scientific practice—and this is stopping progress in physics”… but OK. #philsci

This past week, I had the pleasure of welcoming Oluwaseun Sanwoolu from the Center for Cybersocial Dynamics at our department’s Colloquium to talk about her research on the possibility of close personal relationships with AI. Excellent talk and conversations throughout her stay.

All GenX media

Yesterday, Oliwaseun Sanwoolu visited my grad seminar to discuss her and @johnfsymons.bsky.social’s deeply philosophical/beautiful paper on why #AI can’t be your friend or address #loneliness. It’s the best paper/take on the topic right now. #AIethics #philtech link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Happy to share a new OA article: “What Will Happen to Humanity in a Million Years? Gilbert Hottois and the Temporality of Technoscience.” This is the first full overview of Gilbert Hottois’s philosophical work — and why it still matters. 1/ link.springer.com/article/10.1... #philsci #philtech

Nice op ed by Boaz Barak There is too much of a blurring of lines between academics and activism at universities We need more professionalism and we should make clear that our mission is scholarship, not activism www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/o...

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences has released the results of a new humanities department survey, including a specific report on philosophy departments: www.amacad.org/humanities-i...

E.g., I spent 2hrs with a student during office hours yielding and refining Philosophy questions about #AI, #loneliness, serendipity, etc. (things I write about) How many of us have had access to that kind of expertise in our lives, that kind of interaction, at that kind of level/depth? #philtech

I really think AI as Normal Technology is the most sober take in a sea of uncritical doom and hype. Nevertheless, I think that LLM’s chat interface represents an absolutely ABNORMAL kind of interlocutor. Most humans have not had this kind of interaction with other humans. #philtech #AIethics

To be clear, it’s not that I necessarily understand more about these things. Rather, we should be asking a broader set of experts (economists, historians, neuroscientists, philosophy of mind, etc.) about these impacts and implications and not just machine learning experts. #philtech #AIethics

Who is an “AI expert” and what are they an expert on? They are asking computer scientist and ML practitioners about these complex civilization changes, history and philosophy of tech. What do they know? Most understand very little beyond their technical field. #AIethics #philtech

“is my calculator horny?“ our tech columnist asks. “i entered 5318008 into it and turned it upside down. what i saw surprised me”