Gina Helfrich

People Are Calling Meta Ray-Bans "Pervert Glasses" On Bluesky, users quickly embraced the term "pervert glasses" to refer to Meta's Ray Ban smart glasses, following a shocking investigation.

Make it stick.

A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator YouTube video by Forbrukerrådet - Norwegian Consumer Council

"Make people dependent enough, and then make it shitty"

Still giggling at this hilarious video from the Norwegian Consumer Council "A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator" which seems a perfect embodiment of Silicon Valley and tech generally these days

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Up...

So glad they did a consultation first! Democracy is when you ask the public what they want before you do the opposite

Lost in the noise over Trump cutting off Anthropic is the basic idea that autonomous weapons are a horrible turn in warfare. They are inhumane and undemocratic. They are also catastrophically ineffective at this point, slaughtering civilians by the thousands in Ukraine, Gaza, and now Iran.

‘The announcement is surprising, because Anthropic has described itself as the AI company with a “soul.”’

‘Google working with the Pentagon is surprising, bc its motto is “don’t be evil.”’

*stares into camera with dead eyes*

The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents | Fortune Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said older generations “screwed up” giving students access to so much technology: “I genuinely hope Gen Z quickly figures that out and gets mad.”

Now THAT's a headline.

"The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents"

fortune.com/2026/02/21/l...

Under Starmer, recognised refugees can no longer reunite with their children.

Recognised refugees.

Denied the right to reunite with their children.

It’s diabolical. Worse than anything the Tories did. & no, the racists are not & never will be satisfied.

So yes, he’s hated.

Your Ring doorbell is helping ICE terrorize your neighbors.

Check out our new op-ed! With @taniaduarte.bsky.social @markwong.bsky.social, @suoman.bsky.social, & @timdavies.org.uk.

We argue that these collabs normalize close relationships w/Big-Tech, setting them up to be key actors in governance who provide tech solutions to important social ‘problems’.

The Real Cost of the UK’s ‘Free AI Training for All’ is Democracy Researchers argue the UK's 'AI Skills Hub' should be re-thought with input from civil society groups and public interest organizations.

The Real Cost of the UK’s ‘Free AI Training for All’ is Democracy

via @elinorcarmi.bsky.social and co. Thank you for writing this.

www.techpolicy.press/the-real-cos...

ICE Is Expanding Across the US at Breakneck Speed. Here’s Where It’s Going Next ICE plans to lease offices throughout the US as part of a secret, months-long expansion campaign. WIRED is publishing dozens of these locations.

NEW: ICE is leasing offices throughout the US as part of a secret, months-long expansion campaign. WIRED is publishing dozens of these locations.

800 Google employees demand an end to any cloud contracts with ICE and CBP The petition also called for executives to protect vulnerable Google employees, "from cafeteria workers to data center employees."

According to an organizer, “all signatories are full-time employees, and nearly 30% are Google Cloud workers.”

One of the antagonists in my book on John Doar is a segregationist judge in Mississippi named Harold Cox.

In 1964, Cox called black plaintiffs in his courtroom "a bunch of chimpanzees," a public comment which generated national outrage and a congressional effort to impeach him.

Today? Meh.

Living in Minnesota right now means getting your heart broken every day, multiple times a day. Some days it also means having your faith in humanity restored. Please keep watching Minnesota, if you live elsewhere. Things are still dire.

ERC PhD studentship: The Ethics and Philosophy of Science of Machine Learning | Scholarships and Student Funding | Student Administration This is a four-year ERC funded PhD studentship (starting in September 2026).

Good news - we have a new ERC-funded 4-year PhD Studentship at the University of Edinburgh, based in Philosophy and our Centre @technomoralfutures.bsky.social, supervised by Dr Emily Sullivan; the project applies philosophy of science to assessing ML's epistemic & social value. Apply by 16 March!

Thinking about how some people went from “lean in” to “trad wife” in a mere decade.

Abstract Al assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively supervise AI remains unclear. Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained mastery of a new asynchronous programming library with and without the assistance of Al. We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding tasks showed some productivity improvements, but at the cost of learning the library. We identify six distinct AI interaction patterns, three of which involve cognitive engagement and preserve learning outcomes even when participants receive AI assistance. Our findings suggest that Al-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation - particularly in safety-critical domains.

‘Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition… We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average.’
arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245

QMUL's poster removal: Management threatens staff with disciplinary action over posters and stickers No clarity is given about what is deemed antisemitic Management reduces all Jewish colleagues to one position Possible precedent of repression & censorship .Management refuses to engage meaningfully Management repeats the same statement they issued in February 2024 when they broke into the union office Management claims this is an established policy though they escalate from previous practice

Colleagues were interviewed on BBC Radio 4 about @qmul.bsky.social's sudden escalation in taking down posters & threatening disciplinary action.

It is a great explanation of what's happening & its dangers.

Listen from 22min in: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... or clipped: youtu.be/SJGnCrDaCf0?...

Does women’s health need sex-specific algorithms? In a paper just out in Big Data & Society (bigdatasoc.bsky.social) we at the GenderSci Lab warn against the growing use of so-called “pink” and “blue” algorithms, arguing that they risk embedding biological sex essentialist assumptions into medicine.

Tesla's own Robotaxi data confirms crash rate 3x worse than humans even with monitor Tesla’s nascent robotaxi program is off to a rough start. New NHTSA crash data, combined with Tesla’s new disclosure of...

New NHTSA crash data, combined with Tesla’s new disclosure of robotaxi mileage, reveals Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher than human drivers, and that’s with a safety monitor in every car.

Tesla has reported 9 crashes involving its robotaxi fleet in Austin, TX.

/1

The cast of SCTV

SCTV is on Internet Archive if you'd like to enjoy the early work of Catherine O'Hara and her fellow sketch comedy gods.

S1: archive.org/details/sctv...
S2: archive.org/details/sctv...
S3: archive.org/details/19-m...
S4-5: archive.org/details/66-s...
S6 + Cinemax: archive.org/details/sctv... #TVSky

App for Quitting Porn Leaked Users' Masturbation Habits Hundreds of thousands of users told the app intimate details about their sexual urges, which are now exposed.

it's hard to explain how horrible and dangerous this app and the people who made it are but I tried: www.404media.co/app-for-quit...

Jamie Webb, Shannon Vallor and Gina Helfrich sit together in the Edinburgh Futures Institute having a conversation. They are all smiling.

The CTMF brings together philosophers, technologists, policymakers & researchers to tackle one of the defining questions of our time:

How can we build technologies that truly serve human flourishing?

This video captures the heart of that mission & the voices of those shaping it ▶️ edin.ac/4ai5OiC

Bluesky hivemind - views please!

If you were writing an academic-adjacent piece and needed to include clear but accessible stuff on AI / algorithmic bias and its societal impacts, what are your go-to texts?

I have lots but want to make sure I'm not missing a classic!

RTs welcome 🙂

Here's a regular white guy (literally "Chad") not a protester. because, "It seemed pointless, or just a way for people to expiate their sense of guilt." Chad witnessed something shattering. And, that all changed in a moment.

Excellent article!

ICE killing #AlexPretti should remind you of police killing #PhilandoCastille. Both men had concealed weapon permits, did not draw their guns, & were killed in Minn. These homicides are the price of unaccountable policing. These deaths are variations on the same fatal theme.

Hundreds of staff leave Edinburgh University amid cuts drive According to the university, 345 of these departures were the result of a targeted voluntary severance (VS) scheme run by the institution in 2025.

Missing from the coverage of redundancies at Edinburgh: this was done in such a haphazard, uncoordinated way, there are now core teams who have gone from 5 people to 1 with no change in workload or pressure and huge loss in knowledge of institutional process. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2576321...

Pop-up AI defacing your article critical of AI captures a lot of what it feels like to work in this space.
@lmesseri.bsky.social

Genuine question:
What would be “much more serious” than CSAM?