AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state
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
Beyond Redistribution: Rethinking UBI and the politics of automation
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
Parking at hospitals has been a disaster for my entire career but it’s getting worse and actively harms patients and their families/supporters.
As the authors point out, a consistent systemic approach has been totally absent. Why is hospital parking so expensive? Two economics researchers explain
What’s the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT?
Unless you’re an extreme power user, asking AI questions every day is still a rounding error on your total electricity footprint… The reason we often think that ChatGPT is an energy guzzler is because of the initial statement: it uses 10 times more energy than a Google search. Even if this is accurate, what’s missing is the context that a Google search uses a really tiny amount of energy. Even 10 times a really tiny number is still tiny.
Sadly this only explains part of the user experience.
University of Zürich researchers undertake an ethically shady experiment on a subreddit involving the use of A.I.-generated comments. Astonishingly this was approved the University of Zürich’s Institutional Ethics Review Board.
Welcome to the semantic apocalypse
A post about A.I., “Studio Ghibli” style and the draining of meaning.
More than 2,200 jobs being cut across Australian universities.
It was only a few years ago more that 17,000 were lost during COVID.
Beautiful work by Julian Fell and Simon Elvery with this visual storytelling:
Over five decades, here’s how voters have shifted away from the major parties - ABC
Fascinating Bandcanp Daily post on the pioneers of computer music via Bruce Sterling
Turmoil has engulfed the Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying nations is in dispute.
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