Caroline Ashcroft

Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism | Rutger Bregman As a historian, I’ve studied the major consumer boycotts of history. We can take down ChatGPT and send a powerful signal to Silicon Valley, says author and historian Rutger Bregman

Very convincing call to cancel your ChatGTP subscription if you have one. There are very good reasons, it's painless as there are alternatives, and it may form part of an effective boycott!

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Catastrophic Temporalities in the Early Anthropocene: Dialectic, Plurality, Difference Published in History of European Ideas (Ahead of Print, 2026)

Delighted to see this superb piece by Callum Barrell published in History of European Ideas today - notionally a review of 'Catastrophic Technology' but so much more! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

‘Totalitarian’ Technologies and the Transformation of the Political World: A Radical Cold War Critique | Blog of the APA “The world in which we live today and which surrounds us, is a technological one,” wrote Günther Anders in 1979. The Cold War world, just as much as our own, was a world fundamentally shaped by techno...

A piece I wrote on 'Catastrophic Technology' for the American Philosophical Association blog - just up blog.apaonline.org/2026/02/16/t...

The cover of the book, featuring a mushroom cloud

Now online: Eric Loefflad (University of Kent) reviews "Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought (@edinburghup.bsky.social, 2024) by @carolineashcroft.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Fantastic conference in the gorgeous town of Freiburg yesterday - thank you @martinbaesler.bsky.social for the invitation to come and speak!

Why artificial intelligence will not take over the world There is an easy answer to this question, and a hard one.

Long been of the opinion that child development is a missing piece in creating a machine that can truly think. (Maybe the only way to replicate a human mind is replicate how human minds are made.)

More thought-through analysis here 👇
luciantruscott.substack.com/p/why-artifi...

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."
- Hannah Arendt

"I like to dream about a people who have the wits and the strength of character to choose what they like and want from complex technology, and just leave what they don't need aside - instead of letting everything become a need and then an obligation and then a mess..." - Ursula K. Le Guin

Trump is concentrating power. A key faction of judges supports the idea | Jan-Werner Müller The ‘unitary executive’ theory – backed by some conservative lawyers – is largely bogus. But it could wreak havoc on democracy

...Musk might go/be sacrificed before too long (after declaring victory/bogus figures about fraud eliminated, of course)...

...but we might still be stuck with a unitary executive, with far too much power concentrated in the president's hands:...

Research seminar 10/2025

I'll be speaking (online) about technology and nature at the LUPS Research Institute for Politics and Government this Wednesday at 1pm UK time. Please do join! ripg.uni-nke.hu/hirek/2025/0...

Techno-optimists will doom us all: Trump, Musk, and the apocalypse of too much | Caroline Ashcroft

I wrote about technology, catastrophe and the risks of techno-optimism:

iai.tv/articles/tec...

PhD student in the history of science - Uppsala University PhD student in the history of science, Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University

Two salaried 4-year PhD positions open at the Department of History of Science and Ideas in Uppsala, one in idéhistoria (intellectual/cultural history, broadly speaking), the other in history of science:

www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

Catastrophic Technology | Edinburgh University Press Caroline Ashcroft explores the connections between current and mid-twentieth-century thought on the catastrophic potential of technology

📚 New on the blog!

From nuclear war to climate breakdown, how do we make sense of the catastrophic potential of technology? @carolineashcroft.bsky.social explores perspectives on the place of technology in the end of the world.

Read now 👉 edin.ac/4h0Hi65

Top AI Investor Says Goal Is to Crash Human Wages AI totally "crashing" everyone's wages is a necessary stepping stone towards a better future, argues billionaire Marcus Andreessen.

For people who need villains to wear shirts saying “I’m the villain,” here you go.

Caroline Ashcroft's "Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought" Caroline Ashcroft is Stipendiary Lecturer in Politics at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford. She works in twentieth century p...

I wrote about Catastrophic Technology for the page 99 test: page99test.blogspot.com/2024/12/caro...

The (im)possibility of responsible military AI governance Professor Elke Schwarz argues that AI governance is complicated by factors which are intrinsic to AI systems themselves.

Just out: my latest for the ICRC Humanitarian Law & Policy Blog, in which I highlight some persistent tensions that complicate the notion of 'Responsible AI' for the military domain. #civmilsky #milsky blogs.icrc.org/law-and-poli...

Thank you 🙂

Thank you! Enjoy!

Very pleased and excited that Catastrophic Technology is NOW OUT! (And just in time for Christmas 😉) edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-catastr...

The Big AI Risk Not Enough People Are Seeing Beware technology that makes us less human.

"In 1977, Ivan Illich, an Austrian-born philosopher, vagabond priest, and ruthless critic of metastatic bureaucracies, declared that we had entered 'the age of Disabling Professions.'"

Interesting to see Illich appear again in the news!
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Very pleased to have a new paper out in Journal of the Philosophy of History (open access!) on Foucault and Arendt on technology and history. brill.com/view/journal...