Any system that has to negotiate pedestrians and other non automated drivers who can drive anywhere (unlike trains and planes) needs theory of mind. Successes of self driving cars are seen when roads are fully memorised, so the car operates like a simulated train... 2/n
Also, when reporters start talking about the chatbots this way, it is imperative to remind them they are basically asking a toaster for comment. They should be a lot more embarrassed about this than they currently are.
“Grok told CNN…” no it didn’t. You typed stuff into an unreliable calculator.
Honored that our article, "The Myth of AGI", was one of Tech Policy Press's Top 30 read pieces of the year.
In some great company here, especially with @eryk.bsky.social's "Anatomy of an AI Coup".
www.techpolicy.press/top-30-most-...
(with @emilymbender.bsky.social)
The problem is that the new assistants aren’t as consistent at controlling smart home devices as the old ones. While they were often frustrating to use, the old Alexa and Google Assistant (and the current Siri) would generally always turn on the lights when you asked them to, provided you used precise nomenclature. Today, their “upgraded” counterparts struggle with consistency in basic functions like turning on the lights, setting timers, reporting on the weather, playing music, and running the routines and automations on which many of us have built our smart homes. I’ve noticed this in my testing, and online forums are full of users who have encountered it. Amazon and Google have acknowledged the struggles they’ve had in making their revamped generative AI-powered assistants reliably perform basic tasks. And it’s not limited to smart home assistants; ChatGPT can’t consistently tell time or count.
AI ran into a brick wall trying to control smart home devices this year, which feels like the canary in the coal mine for a lot of things. Excellent @jp2e.bsky.social dive into why and what comes next www.theverge.com/tech/845958/...
reddit post from a presumably young person who watched sex and the city and couldn’t get over how much people smoked indoors. “wouldn’t everything smell bad?” they asked
this is a good reminder of how things that are shitty but have been accepted as normal and inevitable can actually turn out to be abnormal and evitable with some science, time, education and political will
My head nearly fell off. The actual Minister for Health said this?
m.independent.ie/irish-news/t...
here-we-go-again-again-final-version-v2.docx
Bait and switch 😂😂😂
and all of the arguments we made 5 yrs ago in this paper about why the idea of robot rights relies on faulty assumptions about the nature of human cognition and intelligence still hold
Robot Rights?: Let's Talk about Human Welfare Instead dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...
It’s blowing my mind that schools, universities, public services would run headlong into this. We spent 15 years documenting black boxes. This is a black box in a black hole!
In a text message in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wouldn’t say that child safety was his top concern “when I have a number of other areas I’m more focused on like building the metaverse.” Zuckerberg also shot down or ignored requests by Nick Clegg, Meta's then-head of global public policy, to better fund child safety work.
💀💀
Stack of blocks labeled, all modern digital infrastructure. A ratchet tipping over the entire stack is labeled AI. A load bearing pillar is labeled unpaid open source development. Another label is AWS, and Cloudflare and Unpaid Open Source Developers.
Extremely upset that a throw-away XKCD joke somehow became the organizing principle for the Internet.
Update: European Commission is starting "pre-infringement dialogue" with Ireland about our complaint against Ireland's process to appoint the new Data Protection Commissioner
These "EU Pilot" dialogues occur where the Commission suspects a Member State has broken EU law
ec.europa.eu/implementing...
A Facebook post from Scrivener: "Unlike most apps these days, Scrivener does not use AI in any way. However, if you're on a Mac, you may see an AI prompt. Here's why, and what you can do if you want to remove this" attention-grabbing graphic says "SCRIVENER AND AI: WHY DO I SEE AI PROMPTS IN MY SCRIVENER PROJECTS ON MAC?"
Not satisfied with just destroying their own brand goodwill, OS companies are now using AI to try to destroy the good names of the apps users install. (Scrivener taking out adds to explain how it has no AI but Apple adds some anyway.)
Discourse surrounding “AI” these days often feels like a guy showing you his shovel and you say, “that’s a nice shovel” and he says “I am going to perform surgery on my mother with this shovel” and you say “Oh God please don’t that is not what a shovel is for.”
“We are not doing a traditional report this year as we’ve evolved beyond that to formats that are more dynamic and accessible—stories, videos, and insights that show inclusion in action,” Frank Shaw, chief communications officer at Microsoft, told HR Brew via email. “Our mission and commitment to our culture and values remain unchanged: empowering every person and organization to achieve more.”
Tech companies are backing away from creating diversity reports.
Microsoft, which released its annual diversity and inclusion report in 2024, is choosing to not do one in 2025.
www.hr-brew.com/stories/2025...
The content is still obviously delusional to anyone reading it. It’s just organised crazy. But the real danger is the internal effect on the user. The AI provides coherence and validation, stabilising the narrative they’re caught in.
Loved this bit : “The most lucrative users – English-speaking professionals willing to pay $20-200 monthly for premium AI subscriptions – become the implicit template for ‘superintelligence’.”
🤖 "Holes in the web: Huge swathes of human knowledge are missing from the internet. By definition, GenAI is shockingly ignorant too."
Excellent essay on algorithmic epistemological knowledge and the collapse of knowledge throughout mean-driven data machines.
aeon.co/essays/gener...
In a short piece for @techpolicypress.bsky.social, @abeba.bsky.social and I write #AIHype Is Steering EU Policy Off Course.
Stop peddling in unscientific discourse about “AGI” and “superintelligence.” Serve citizens. Don't cater to the whims of tech CEOs.
www.techpolicy.press/ai-hype-is-s...
cool pincer movement if you truly grasp:
AI & any concept relating to it like so-called guardrails are a scam in the deepest sense like a perpetual motion machine or a quija board — and not only a scam like a pyramid scheme which is a possible way to make money if you are first in first out
🧵
1/n
im frustrated about a lot of things (including the fact that someone told me that using the word "epistemology" in a grant application was "jargon") but i am ALSO very frustrated about THIS
sts researchers: :spend decades tracing the way well-intentioned design choices constrained by culture, capital, and the material environment can have negative outcomes in aggregate:
ai companies: lets put a chatbot in a doll that tells kids to set fires
futurism.com/artificial-i...
As we write in The Guardian this morning, the Commission’s plan to gut EU digital rules will hurt Europe’s startups and give U.S. tech an unassailable advantage, confirming Europe as a digital vassal.
Piece by George Riekeles and I.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
this was making me nuts recently so I recorded all the times I had to bat away all the useless AI shit in acrobat. four times right after opening the doc, and some things I couldn't even clear
Scientists and scholars in AI and its social impacts call on von der Leyen to retract #AIHype statement.
@olivia.science
@abeba.bsky.social
@irisvanrooij.bsky.social
@alexhanna.bsky.social
@rocher.lc
@danmcquillan.bsky.social
@robin.berjon.com
& many others have signed
www.iccl.ie/press-releas...
Her husband was at Broadview one month and she was never able to talk to him. Not until he was already in Mexico. He had been in Chicago for 20 years. Her husband shared that the numbers of people there were astounding. It just makes me think how many people that are not counted/just disappeared.
You don’t need to burn books if you can take them off the shelf and say “AI made me do it”.
