My NEO robot after I learn the 3rd worlder piloting them is mad chill

“the next few years are not about owning a super-useful robot, but raising one, letting it learn from your home..”. So usual AI industry social dynamic: Global South kid paid pennies to puppet robot, whilst Global North ‘owner’ pays for privilege of training AI, only real beneficiary is tech firm.

Absolutely smitten with @paulmmcooper.com's fascinating podcast on the rise and fall of the Mongolian empire, including how it inadvertently aided the European colonial project which followed open.spotify.com/episode/7iWl...

The Emperor's generated clothes on.ft.com/427C17Z

LiveAI demo fails on the first prompt at Meta Connect 2025. #Meta #AI #LiveAI

My new paper with Lewis Cameron on 'The Role of Mundane Resistance in the Spectacular Failure of the Smart Home' is now available from Big Data & Society. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I couldn't get out of my head the sight of my MP, Lilian Greenwood, cosplaying in Parliament as a suffragette, just days before voting to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist group.

This author's work on the metaverse is a salutory lesson in the sunk cost danger of researching novel technologies. Months of effort only for it to turn out the platform you're an expert in is a dead scene (though tbh in this example that was clear from the beginning...)

An awful time to work in creative industries. Intellectual and creative development largely happens in-the-doing; in the act of writing, drawing, recording. GenAI doesn't shortcut the process, it short-changes it. aftermath.site/ai-video-gam...

If we wanted to assert British sovereignty, rather than leaving the EU we should have jailed Microsoft execs until they made Word's spellcheck recognise English spellings. I've spent my entire adult life assuming this was going to be fixed any day now.

Tech companies are as good at humanising their AI, as they are at erasing the human labour that trains their AI. www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/06/1...

Jeanette Winterson's take on AI as "alternative intelligence" doesn't merit a single tweet, but having ensured reading it I need to cleanse my soul www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

Very good on The Great University Disaster. Note it's *not* attacking administrators: indeed unis may be *under*-managed. The point is that extreme, inappropriate corporatization and bureaucratization has destroyed their very purpose, like a virus from within. (1/2) academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

thewalrus.ca/i-used-to-te... Higher Ed and it's regulatory overlords desperately need to engage with the reality of post-genAI assessment, whilst there's still *a little* time to do it thoughtfully. The alternative is waiting until it's thoughtlessly forced on us in a moral panic.

Yet another scandal brewing within UK Higher Ed: universities can get research money for everyone they've sacked. Big ghost fleets of lecturers who don't exist will be launched into the next Research Excellence Framework. Unis will laugh and cash in (1/2). englishassociation.ac.uk/ref2029-conc...

You're remarkably far down the neolib education rabbit hole when your 11y/o brings this home. Notable it has the ideological self-confidence to acknowledge both how awful exams for primary kids are, and that they're only having to endure this in order to feed the metrics.

Am unjustifiably excited by seemingly being the first human to notice that Moderat's glorious video for Bad Kingdom features Wollaton Hall near my house, so much so that I don't care that you don't care.

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

Bets on how long before Higher Ed's head-in-the-sand over AI misuse in assessments crashes into a media moral panic about rampant cheating, and we find ourselves kneejerked into exams for everything?

Everything about this case is grotesque, but fact that no tracking tag small enough is available is transparently discriminatory design and in breach of Equality Act's coverage of age and gender. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

🚨 NEW BLOG from Fairwork Philippines 🇵🇭 on the health and safety hazards for workers due to climate change induced extreme weather events: https://buff.ly/4hjWgV7 @oiioxford.bsky.social @cheryllsoriano.bsky.social

Further confirmation from this "analysis" (aka regurgitating breathless corporate self-promotion) that we're at the point where any software function at all is now called AI. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Wrote a short piece on our new national commitment to AI maximalism: cennydd.com/writing/on-a...

OMG, I *just* wrote about this phenomenon a couple of months ago. Stuff on the emotional fallout from robot death in 'The Automated Heart: Digital Domesticity and Emotional Labour Saving', available here: uwlpress.uwl.ac.uk/newvistas/ar... Saving this example for future teaching.

In which a dad livestreams his daughter's tears whilst he explains to her that her Internet connected emotional support buddy is going to die because the company went bust. x.com/ZeroStateRef...

New from me on what the rage and glee on public display after the killing of a healthcare CEO portends. I suspect the corporate world will respond with more security and retreating even more into their gated lives. They would be advised to read up on history. 🎁🔗 www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/o...

In sci-fi the "AI crash" comes when it runs amok miscontrolling the world's financial systems. In our reality, it follows the realisation that half a trillion dollars have been diverted into a tech that is overwhelming useless.

That moment of horror when you realise your end of year Spotify analytics have been polluted by your children. All that work on my cultural metrics, ruined.

Media has a big 24hrs ahead reminding us that only some forms of murder are ok.

The very different media treatment given to farming and traveller communities' respective claims for special land rights suggests latter really need the super rich to find an exploitable tax loophole in caravan parks www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

'Ewart Keep, emeritus professor of education...at the University of Oxford, told delegates at the Independent Higher Education conference that banks were the “invisible funder and regulator” of UK universities, and said questions would be asked about big spending decisions made in past years.' 1/5

Sure millions of humans are decamping to bluesky, but from the looks of my old account the bots are more than replacing us. I look forward to Musk's triumphant growth figures!

Vaguely mind blowing that in 2024 tech writers can still envision the future of socio-tech interactions without thinking about the political economies at play. Californian Ideology lives on.

Behind the individual stories, this is an absolutely damming indictment of the perverse incentives driving the marketised academy. h/t @warrenpearce.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

*Our* work Reeves, don't try and steal all the credit - there is plenty to go around

What being an academic in the marketised university feels like on a good day youtu.be/OnkTUKtxRic?...

I told you we should never have left MySpace.