what if technology wasn't something that was done to us, but instead something that we do?
06.11.2025 00:41
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what if technology wasn't something that was done to us, but instead something that we do?
Screenshot of a paper entry: Fictional Failures and Real-World Lessons: Ethical Speculation Through Design Fiction on Emotional Support Conversational AI Authors: Faye Kollig, Jessica Pater, Fayika Farhat Nova, Casey Fiesler (There are tabs with "abstract" and "summary" and "summary" is selected.)
The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.
‘Death remains my intimate shadow partner. It has been with me since birth, always hovering close by. I understand one day we will finally waltz together into the ether. I hope when that time comes, I die with the satisfaction of a life well-lived, unapologetic, joyful, & full of love.’
—Alice Wong
I usually listen to Alice Coltrane when writing.
we have gone from a world in which we were told not to cite wikipedia because it was unreliable to a world where wikipedia might be the only reliable source left on the internet and we all owe a lot to the pedantic nerds who got us there
writing is thinking, drawing is thinking, telling stories is thinking.
i understand the earnest impulse to get rid of "the boring stuff", but even the boring stuff is thinking.
depriving yourself of time to think about things is sad, but depriving kids of time to think about things is just cruel.
Every rich person is going to tell *you* how great AI teaching is while sending *their* kids to the kind of schooling the Ancient Greeks would recognize. I just wish everyone would think about why that is.
pay very close attention to Wikipedia to find a way out of the AI slop internet www.404media.co/wikipedia-ed...
Every "tech" guy is just a VC guy in a subculture that gets called "tech" for no particular reason. Most real "tech" - like, i dunno, cutting edge materials research - doesn't get called that while "a new pizza delivery app" does
A very odd thing about Artificial Intelligence as a discipline in computer science is that it historically shifted from “understanding the human brain better” to “we give up on understanding the brain and will just replace humans despite having no fucking clue”
two rows of audience, the presenters and a tv screen
In this #WIConf2025 session on GenAI and Algorithmic Impact, Yasmin Kafai and @metaxa.net talk about computational empowerment and break down #AI #auditing into simple steps for end users. Contributions by @luismn.bsky.social
Writing is a skill to be trained!
I also worry that we’re losing sight of how writing is a crucial form of thinking. Plenty of ideas don’t fully develop until you’ve tried to work them out on the page, and I see AI writing assistance actively robbing students of this crucial idea development phase
it feels like the call of our times is to figure how to make abstract/non-immediate harms (like climate, tech, how hurting one hurts us all) resonate enough for many people to act against their material/immediate comfort
Would it hurt people in tech to go and *talk* to someone with a degree in education? Most people don't understand what schools do. TL;DR: it's a lot more than info dumping into student's heads and it is certainly a lot more than daycare.
When I see this, I wonder what happens when it gets the translation wrong — potentially in an offensive way — and the speaker doesn’t know, but also how it will get people to change their speech patterns to be legible to the automated system, as we know people already do with voice assistants.
Here is Pope Leo’s page. Edit history is already fascinating: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Le...
"WE'VE ARRANGED A society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?" "Science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along."
I think a lot about what Carl Sagan said in one of his final interviews.
One of the organizing principles I am constantly working to embrace in my own life is that once people arrive to the fight with genuine readiness to act, no matter how late they are, they are welcome and can be organized and moved
A hardcover copy of There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone. The black cover features a vertical strip with the title and a photo of Atlanta’s skyline.
After many years of reporting and writing, the day is finally here: THERE IS NO PLACE FOR US is out today.
I poured everything into this book, and I hope it ignites outrage at the fact that so many people in the richest nation on earth have been deprived of one of the most basic human necessities.
I’ll add that children are also the present. They contribute to the world and have agency, dreams, needs, and rights :)
Why let corporations decide what is true or important? asbruckman.medium.com/why-let-corp...
From Ursula K. LeGuin’s introduction to “The Left Hand of Darkness:”
Calling her "clairvoyant" and the like is just another iteration of the "magical negro" trope. She paid attention and wrote about issues that wealthy white folks didn't want to see.
✨ Very excited that my book proofs arrived! “The Politics of Care Work: Puerto Rican Women Organizing for Social Justice” will be out with @dukepress.bsky.social in May 2025 ✨ It’s starting to feel real!
a gentle reminder that a chatbot does NOT have personality, identity, gender, volution, intentions, or feelings... it is a computer program that's extremely good at predicting the next word in a sequence based on previous words it has "seen"
At Literary Hub, @julie-phillips.com writes about Ursula's activism, and her essay "The Election, Lao Tzu, a Cup of Water."
Historian here. Can confirm!
"Overall, Black and Hispanic faculty received 7% more negative votes from college committees and were 44% less likely to receive unanimous “yes” votes than their white and Asian colleagues." - Kate Langin, Science
www.science.org/content/arti... #AcademicSky #PhDsky
Abstract: Indigeneity remains a major axis of stratification in Latin America, making questions of when and why people identify as Indigenous central to understanding and addressing inequality in the region. Using representative Latinobarometer data from 16 countries, collected between 2007 and 2020, the authors analyze the two most widely used instruments for the identification of Indigenous people in Hispanophone America: self-identification and respondents’ mother tongue. Descriptive analysis shows that though the majority of respondents are nonspeakers and nonidentifiers, nonnegligible proportions of respondents are identifiers and speakers, identifiers and nonspeakers, and nonidentifiers and speakers. In multivariate analyses, the authors test factors associated with identification conditional on linguistic background. The findings support hypotheses that privilege and, in some cases, social mobility are negatively associated with Indigenous identification and of race as a “master category.” The authors also document that Indigenous identification has increased over birth cohorts. The results contribute to the literature on the complexity of measuring Indigeneity in the Latin American context.
New #sociology research paper from me and Julia Behrman:
Demarcation and Difference: Language and Indigenous Self-Identity in Latin America.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...