🚨 Techno-optimism reduces willingness to address climate change 🚨
In a new preprint, @maiensachis.bsky.social, @fdabl.bsky.social, and I examined the causal effect of techno-optimist beliefs on the willingness to contribute to addressing climate change.
🔗 Read the paper: lnkd.in/eE847_jK
Adjusting for covariates including political orientation, trust in politics, education, sex, and age, we find that having techno-optimist beliefs reduces the probability of being willing to contribute to addressing climate change by 18.7% on average.
“If [wealthy, powerful people] can get us to accept that the future’s already settled, AI is already here, the end is already here, then we will create that for them. My most daring idea is to refuse.” — @tressiemcphd.bsky.social
Fact is, Ireland's expert body interpretation of 'climate neutrality' –deeming stabilising at peak ºC sufficient 🇮🇪 action– is directly refuted by their own 'Paris Test' of their own scenario shortlist.
So why say it?
[Livestock interests' preference to do little about methane is not a great reason.]
This month, @storybundle.bsky.social launched a global storytelling bundle focused on translated books which will support @globalvoiceslingua.bsky.social, our network of volunteer translators who bring underreported stories into dozens of languages.
lingua.globalvoices.org/2026/02/stor...
Gas prices up by around 50% today.
A painful reminder that relying on imported fossil fuels is a risky strategy.
bsky.app/profile/oliv...
i’m tired of every paper (even critical ones) on societal impact of AI starting by both-siding the “benefits” and risks/harms of AI
in academia, i would like us to arrive at a collective reckoning that we don’t need to play both sides. it's totally legit to clearly state just the harms. period
Criminally funny, but also I'm crying inside
Norway comes for the #TechBros
www.forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree
vimeo.com/1168468796?f...
I may repost this daily. Apparently the idea that it's possible to abstain from using the baby-eating machine is too radical. It's not even a Q of reclaiming the machine for "good" - if it helps to output more papers, faster, get more grants, etc then, sure what's a few babies? (not mine tho obv)
This is a straight up plug, but...
If you're curious about what this felt like & exactly what led up to it, I have a chapter in 'Scientists on Survival' where I recount the details.
Available in paperback - www.mombooks.com/book/scienti...
Or as audiobook- www.audible.co.uk/pd/B0FCMVC437
I may repost this daily. Apparently the idea that it's possible to abstain from using the baby-eating machine is too radical. It's not even a Q of reclaiming the machine for "good" - if it helps to output more papers, faster, get more grants, etc then, sure what's a few babies? (not mine tho obv)
A thread about the inhumanity nature of Altman all along the way…
a snippet of a mini-comic, at top - straight line stretches from point A to B. Immediately below, same dot at A, then becomes a curving, meandering line that winds through the page and ends at a point with rays and a question mark emanating from it. Text reads: "Nothing can do this for you - for that robs you of experience and conflates answers with learning. Rather, it's all the decisions you make along the way, the mistakes, struggles, and surprises! These pathways you create - this is learning. https://spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-syllabi/
In case anyone needs it for their syllabi, my statement in gen-Ai from the minicomic I made as a syllabus for class last semester. All online and printable here spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-sy...
ROVÉLO CREATIVE'S GUIDE TO Cyclist Visibility BIke stencil Visible bike stencil behind a dash - invisible invisible unless rolling through a stop sign
Quick Reference.
I wonder if this counts as public impact for my annual report
I made this thread just over a year ago and I feel nothing has changed except now vibe coding and "agents" have taken hype to another level
"I know the machine eats babies! But what if one day the same machine is used to help humans? I think it would be cool if in a few years we reclaim the BABY-NOMMER-9000 and use it for emails only! And with only 1 baby (that we communally own) fed into it per month. So it CAN be reclaimed, ok?"
Thrilled that EXTRACTION was reviewed with such care and detail in @thenation.com magazine www.thenation.com/article/cult...
The Climate Justice Universities Union is at an in-person 🫂 gathering today at the Technological University of the Shannon, talking all about food & food systems 🥕, and how HEIs can contribute to transformative & just change in how and what we eat, how and where it is grown and by whom.
🚨BREAKING NEWS!
Medics that broke windows at JP Morgan HQ to expose fossil fuel financing links to climate devastation found NOT GUILTY today by jurors.
The climate crisis is a health crisis and health professionals have a duty to act when lives are at risk.
Read more here:
healthforxr.com
Powerful words from Sir David King at the launch of #ScientistsOnSurvival last week.
Ireland should not play UEFA games against Israel. We should demand Israel are banned from the competition. Sign and share the petition if you agree my.uplift.ie/petitions/fa... @uplift.ie
#SpeirGorm #SpéirGhorm #SpéirGorm
“Confusion” doesn’t begin to describe our emerging predicament. Seventy-two percent of American teens have turned to A.I. for companionship. A.I. therapists, coaches and lovers are also on the rise. Yet few people realize that some of the frontline technologists building this new world seem deeply ambivalent about what they’re doing. They are so torn, in fact, that some privately admit they don’t plan to use A.I. intimacy tools. “Zero percent of my emotional needs are met by A.I.,” an executive who ran a team mitigating safety risks at a top lab told me. “I’m in it up to my eyeballs at work, and I’m careful.” Many others said the same thing: Even as they build A.I. tools, they hope they never feel the need to turn to machines for emotional support. As a researcher who develops cutting-edge capabilities for artificial emotion put it, “that would be a dark day.”
Developers I spoke to said the same incentives that make bots irresistible can stand in the way of reasonable safeguards, making outright abstention the only sure way to stay safe. Some described feeling stuck between protecting users and raising profits: They support guardrails in theory, but don’t want to compromise the product experience in practice. It’s little wonder the protections that do get built can seem largely symbolic — you have to squint to see the fine-print notice that “ChatGPT can make mistakes” or that Character.AI is “not a real person.” “I’ve seen the way people operate in this space,” said one engineer who worked at a number of tech companies. “They’re here to make money. It’s a business at the end of the day.”
But even if companies can curb serious dependence on A.I. companions — an open question — many of the developers I spoke with were troubled by even moderate use of these apps. That’s because people who manage to resist full-blown digital companions can still find themselves hooked on A.I.-mediated love. When machines draft texts, craft vows and tell people how to process their own emotions, every relationship turns into “a throuple,” a founder of a conversational A.I. business said. “We’re all polyamorous now. It’s you, me and the A.I.”
A genuinely alarming piece in the NYT about how the developers, scientists and assorted techbros behind "AI companions"/"synthetic care" do not even know or understand the potential harms of the tech they're developing but they're too greedy to stop themselves from developing it.
Brilliant column
New OA article just out on "assetizing academic content" led by @jkom.bsky.social with me, @keanbirch.bsky.social & Klaus Beiter, exploring how academic materials are turned into value-generating digital assets by HE institutions, edtech platforms, and AI companies link.springer.com/article/10.1...
The threat of fascism is real. Economics has too often helped rather than hindered its rise. We need an anti-fascist economics to defend our democracies.
So, I’m writing a book to do my part. More soon.
New paper, The imaginary patient. Fantastic health data and where to find them
@danmcquillan.bsky.social
On Ai healthcare and the 'better than nothing' argument
btfp.sp.unipi.it/en/2026/01/t...
