@anuradhas
Assistant Prof/Lecturer in Politics and Policy at University of East Anglia, UK. I study political elites, "expertise", AI Author of "The New Experts", Cambridge Uni Press (2024) anuradhasajjanhar.com
AI agents are being sold as democratic and participatory: a way to decentralise AI by giving every citizen a personal proxy. But is replacing friction with proxies necessarily more democratic? Or does it shift political voice into infrastructure that remains standardised and centrally structured?
One big, cruel grift bankrolled by some the worst men - and a reminder that all education is political.
There will be lots of detailed analysis of this I'm sure, but a few immediate thoughts
- it's premised on the absolute inevitability of more people using more AI at work, despite also saying that businesses are struggling to find viable use cases
That they chose “Lunch atop a Skyscraper,” a photograph of workers during the Great Depression, and superimposed the images of some of the top figures of the new Gilded Age tells you a lot about the role of labor in AI—it’s the Mechanical Turk all over.
Our article on the politics of AI prompts is out now @econsocjournal.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 1/n
"Anatomy of an AI Coup" examines a shift of power from policy makers and bureaucrats to those with the skill to train and fine-tune large language models - often behind system prompts, which further calibrate the gov. worker's options toward the decisions of those who calibrate the system.
Picture of dozens of people walking through a scene of utter devastation, the only buildings still standing are bombed out, the rest is rubble.
Quite aside from anything else, this is what it looks like in Gaza as people try to return home. (📷: Al-Jazeera)
India’s digital public infrastructure is going global—open-source, low-cost, scalable, writes Anuradha Sajjanhar. But big questions remain, she says: What kind of states are we building? Whose power does it serve? What politics are other nations importing? www.techpolicy.press/indias-digit...
We should have asked these same big questions in regards to US digital infrastructure...
I write about India Stack becoming a key national export and ask a question that goes beyond the region: As digital governance is scaled, exported, and repackaged as a global good, we must ask not just what it can do, but also what it displaces.
Here is a gift link to @kashhill.bsky.social's must read piece on the dangers of OpenAI's sycophantic LLMs and the parasocial relationships people are creating with them.
www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/t...
I don’t know if it’s a masculinity thing or a managerial class thing or what. But you don’t actually have to hand it to AI. It’s okay to look at the equation and conclude it’s not worth it.
Not only can it not help me with my research or writing, but its surreptitious adoption by students makes teaching significantly harder, as half the job is now working on the assumption that a range of standard assignments no longer teach human beings anything, because they can simply hand them off.
I keep catching strays from "technology is neutral" people, so let's set things straight.
1) Technology is not neutral, especially the subset of technology called "algorithms"
2) The form-factor that makes a technology into a tool is not neutral
3) How tools are productized is not neutral
[rant]
📣UEA UCU members have voted for 9 days of strike action to commence this week from Thurs 1st May.
📣This is in response to management's plans to continue progressing compulsory redundancies.
📣There is still time for the employer to change course. #SaveUEA
Picketing with @uea-ucu.bsky.social with fierce toddler representation
Trump got in power & went straight after a) people & institutions that produce information & knowledge, and b) people & institutions that monitor & prevent fraud.
I know the world is full of glassy-eyed poorly-informed dipshits, but honestly, how can you construct a benign explanation of this?
On AI, where Europe is on course to over-regulate, Starmer is keen to get closer to the US. “The UK needs to move forward and seize the opportunity of not being Europe,” a source familiar with Mandelson’s letter explained. The prize, Downing Street believes, is a big one that could ease Rachel Reeves’s problems in balancing the books. “AI is transformational,” the Starmer aide said. “What you’re talking about is a level of productivity growth that means everybody in the world, in ten years’ time, is going to be more productive than the most productive person in the world today. We have to make sure that we are in a position to quickly take advantage of it.”
"Utterly delusional" does not even come close.
archive.ph/OVHMg
'generative AI is experimental'
So one of the things that I think is lost on AI proponents is what I call the card catalog effect, a thing I shouldn’t call it because a lot of people probably have no experience with a card catalog.
What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.
Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...
I'm reminded of Lucy Suchman's excellent 2023 piece on "The uncontroversial ‘thingness’ of AI". Suchman urges us, in critical work on "AI" not to cede the ground that "AI" is a thing at all.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
The UK joined the US in not signing the international AI declaration pledging an open, inclusive and ethical approach to Artificial Intelligence. Earlier today @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social argued that this may seem to be in the UK's interest, but in fact it isn't.
blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandp...
This segue is doing more work than I could ever imagine.
maybe 250 words describing status
250-ish social justice words
smaller text -- 400 words on social justice and gender?
And another 150 or so on race
The number of people surprised by the long list of words NSF is targeting makes me think many of you all have not seen this: www.commerce.senate.gov/services/fil...
"The 'doomsday trap' of artificial intelligence is the dehumanization that [it] makes possible. AI is not only a technology, it's...a spectacle designed as pretext to resist empathy and create emotional distance from consequences." @eryk.bsky.social mail.cyberneticforests.com/a-fork-in-th...
I was thinking about this too - do we get social/political/ethical 'points' for criticising AI and big tech?
