Tim Cowlishaw

Every lengthy write-up on "lessons learned" after someone lets an AI process delete their database or all their emails reads like this to me

As an AI ethics researcher, one major concern I have is whether the models being used to help governments drop bombs are doing so fairly and without subtle biases against certain groups

When the Future Feels Foreclosed: AI Resignation and the Power to Act This article develops the concept of ‘AI resignation’ to capture how young people encounter AI not only as a helpful or flawed tool, but as an overpowering and seemingly inevitable force that can for....

"The task of AI education, then, is not merely to teach technical competence, but to cultivate the political imagination and collective capacities necessary to contest and reshape technological power," write Jan‐Philipp Siebold, Annemarie Witschas, and Rainer Mühlhoff.

If you're looking at for-profit super weapons vaporising kids to give the least human man alive a payout or a poll bump and you're nodding solemnly like it's a fucking Wilfred Owen poem there's something extensively, possibly irreparably, wrong with you.

Catalonia's Human Towers The building of human towers (castells) is a centuries-old traditional sport where hundreds of men, women, and children gather in Catalan squares to create b...

Loved iupress.org/978025306716... - an ethnography of how sport, communal celebration, politics and regional identity come together in the practice of human tower building

A graphic that compares the logo for AI product Claude with Kurt Vonnegut's depiction of an asshole from Breakfast of Champions. They are very similar.

I can't be the first to notice that the Claude logo looks exactly how Vonnegut drew an asshole for Breakfast of Champions. This is either intetional or an accident. Either way a good argument for hiring humanities majors.

Feel like people don't discuss the 'independence from foreign oil' side of moving to an all renewables electric grid enough, seems quite relevant right now.

It's interesting seeing all the take-havers having viral takes about AI that are essentially verbatim recitations of deeply researched analyses offered by AI scholars ten years ago, when they those caveats were ignored by press + the general public because the threat wasn't yet so intensely palpable

DIY Methods 2024

DIY Methods, our little conference-by-zine about unconventional approaches to research, rises again! Maybe you'd like to make a zine on your weird/cool approach to methods, and receive a bundle of similarly weird/cool zines in the mail? Pitch submissions are due April 20th. diymethods.net

La victoria de los verdes en un escaño de Manchester vuelve a poner en peligro a Keir Starmer El Partido Laborista queda en tercer lugar, después del Partido Verde y la extrema derecha de Farage, en una circunscripción históricamente laborista y donde el partido del primer ministro había ganad...

ÚLTIMA HORA | La victoria de los verdes en un escaño de Manchester vuelve a poner en peligro a Keir Starmer

Al Policy Manager, Chemical Weapons and High Yield Explosives Anthropic Friendly, MD $245K/yr - $285K/yr Promoted • Be an early applicant

Ah yes, the ethical AI company

massive font: You should live so long. 3M diskettes will live for 200 years apparently. I do not know what a diskette is.

Threatening magazine advertisement for 3M diskettes, 1984.

"It could never happen here" isn't even a political position, but a bunting-infused bit of political nostalgia. The only reason things never happen is because active measures are taken to stop them. Let's make the UK a place it can never happen, rather than optimistically just hoping that's the case

(Apologies @plasmatron.bsky.social and all)

There have not been nearly enough repurcussions for what the News of the World did. Rebekah Brooks got promoted and is currently CEO of News UK.

Raw America (@rawstory) THEY CANCELLED IT: A crowd of protesters breaks out in cheers after a planned data center in New Brunswick, NJ was cancelled amid widespread public outrage. Don't let big tech pollute our communities!...

substack.com/@rawstory/no...

THEY CANCELLED IT: A crowd of protesters breaks out in cheers after a planned data center in New Brunswick, NJ was cancelled amid widespread public outrage. Don't let big tech pollute our communities! Share this everywhere!
@maddow.bsky.social

this is a very basic point to make but I hate that so many tech people are going "whoops haha AI is about to destroy society as we know it!" and yet incredibly few tech people are arguing in favour of just...slowing down the roll-out of AI, apparently progress must crush us and we have no say in it?

nobody is above this one law in particular

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls.

Mulligan and O'Hare, Pancake Day

a graphic showing traditional vs generative AI by energy consumption (more for gen) and climate benefits (more for trad)

gen ai consumes more energy than trad ai

What we found is obvious to you, but it needed to be formalised and analysed and fact-checked thoroughly for everyone else:

When AI is presented as a "net climate benefit", it's a false coupling of old machine learning with new, explosive single-use slop firehose dominating tech today.

“Talk to people who already do”

Y’all never stop talking! I cannot make a move without some version of this same sentence being shouted at me! How about yall talk to ME about *why* I don’t want a future where we use mammoth data centers instead of our own brains

sigh

tumblr user evilwizard posts: ontology professor (adding another grain of sand to my enclosure): is it a pile yet me (up to my neck in sand, struggling to breathe): I’ll never talk ontology professor: just tell me when it becomes a pile and this can all be over it has like 12K reblogs and 16K likes

tumblr still has it, despite everything. social media platforms are really almost impossible to kill.

It’s as Sara Ahmed said: solidarity doesn’t mean that our dreams are the same dreams or that we hope for the same future; it is a recognition that we stand on the same ground.

Because people asked, I want to point folks to some archiving resources that were circulated at the start of the admin's takedown of federal data at CDC, AskJAN, NIH, and discuss why keeping our data is so important.

A thread 🧵

Enlace de descarga: https://tunubesecamirio.com/downloads/informe_centro_de_datos_aragon.pdf

El colectivo Tu Nube Seca Mi Río, que investiga el impacto ecosocial de los centros de datos (IAGen), ha publicado un libro descargable para explicar cuales son las estrategias de las Big Tech para implantarlos en nuestros territorios, y mucho más. ¡Imperdible!

tunubesecamirio.com/2026/02/05/i...