Ben Harris-Roxas

Chatbots, likewise, escalate the risks of typical online secret-sharing. Their conversational design can draw out private information in a format that can be more vivid and revealing — and, if exposed, embarrassing — than even something like a Google search. There’s no simple equivalent to a private iMessage or WhatsApp chat with a friend, which can be encrypted to make snooping harder. (Chatbot logs can use encryption, but especially on major platforms, this typically doesn’t hide what you’re doing from the company itself.) They’re built, for safety purposes, to sense when a user is discussing sensitive topics like suicide and sex.

AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state - The Verge

However, within the automation discourse, UBI proposals also function to smooth over, and thereby naturalize, human displacement. UBI exists within a techno-deterministic worldview that presents automation as an inevitable force rather than as the result of social and political choices. This framing obscures existing power dynamics by portraying technology as a neutral productivity enhancer and labor displacement as a mere externality. In this narrative, UBI merely serves as a compensatory mechanism for technological “progress” while labor-capital dynamics remain unchallenged. Human workers are relegated to merely advocating for redistribution from the “winners” of technological change rather than shaping technological development itself. Furthermore, it reifies who the “winners” and “losers” are, crediting one side for the innovations upon which the other side loses.

_ Beyond Redistribution: Rethinking UBI and the politics of automation_ - LPE

Way back in 2019, when AI was still a relatively niche topic, and only the primitive GPT-2 had been released, I predicted the technology would usher in a “semantic apocalypse” wherein art and language were drained of meaning… Fast forward six years, and the semantic apocalypse has started in earnest. People now report experiencing the exact internal psychological change I predicted about our collective consciousness all those years ago.

Welcome to the semantic apocalypse - The Intrinsic Perspective

We argue instead that populism must be understood as a specific political discourse, a way to articulate all kinds of policies – liberal or protectionist, left-wing or right-wing – as a clash between the virtuous, downtrodden “people” and an unresponsive corrupt “elite”. In this way, one can identify a consistent populist logic in how trade policies are presented regardless of the content of actual policies followed. In our analysis we show that, despite their very opposing trade preferences, the discourses of both protectionist Trump and strongly pro-free trade Conservative Brexiteers in the second half of the 2010s followed very similar articulatory modes flowing from their populism.

The populist logic behind Trump’s tariffs - LSE Blogs

I’m always surprised, given its influence, that HBR remains an evidence-free zone. For example this article makes expansive pronouncements about how A.I. Is being used in 2025. The methodology:

I looked at online forums (Reddit, Quora), as well as articles that included explicit, specific applications of the technology. Perhaps owing to its inherent pseudonymity, Reddit again yielded the richest insights. I read through them myself, and added each relevant post to the tally for that category. Several days later, I emerged with the count and the quotes for each of the new 100 use cases.

The 2025 Top-100 Gen AI Use Case Report lists the top 100 applications now, in 2025, rated according to perceived usefulness and scale of impact (assessed qualitatively by expert review), and includes a quote or several for each.

Seriously?

How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025

Looking ahead, the AI Iron Curtain appears likely to extend into space. For instance, China’s Chang’e 6 Lunar Exploration Mission returned first-ever samples from the far side of the moon in June 2024, but US research scientists cannot view the samples because of the restrictive 2011 Wolf Amendment, which forbids NASA from collaborating directly with China without security approval. Although China invited international scientists to study the samples, the US has erected a self-imposed barrier, stifling beneficial cooperation and hindering progress in this and other critical areas of common interests.

Moving Towards Local and People-Centered Artificial Intelligence - Bot Populi