Josh Bowsher

Re. Why academics might use AI - it's bad of course; I do not and will not use AI. But It's probably not a great idea to cast our colleagues as lazy and suggest instead a more materialist analysis of academic labour and the extreme pressures we're all increasingly under.

Just got the proofs for this academic handbook, The Aesthetics of Machine Vision, which I co-edited with some colleagues during my postdoc, which feels like a million years ago.

Out in September 2026! with @mitpress.bsky.social

A high tech capitalism in which most things don't work.

Medieval Robots – Penn Press A thousand years before Isaac Asimov set down his Three Laws of Robotics, real and imagined automata appeared in European courts, liturgies, and literary tex...

And

www.pennpress.org/978081222357...

And because I am always here to plug medieval research on these topics:

journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/xx...

These look excellent!

www.dukeupress.edu/surrogate-hu...

Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures

Don't know if you've ever come across this, but an excellent account of this phenomenon I think. www.dukeupress.edu/surrogate-hu...

Always great to see your own personal “Do not build the torment nexus” moments come to life.

A few years old now but I wrote a book about how digital culture shaped human rights activism and why that might be a problem.

edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-inf...

Just me settling down for a quiet night of time-motion study...

Reading and Writing the Weather - Bronislaw Szerszynski, 2010 In this article I argue that an adequate response to climate change requires an overcoming of the metaphysics of presence that is structuring our relationship w...

From the Archive: Bronislaw Szerszynski, 'Reading and Writing the Weather' - argues that an adequate response to climate change requires an overcoming of the metaphysics of presence that is structuring our relationship with the weather. (Free Access) (2010) journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

It's worth adding that while the hack of 2+ years ago has been dreadful for British Library users, it is also been awful for BL staff, who cannot fulfil readers' requests and are then confronted by their consequent frustration. With no end in sight.

Generative AI is a societal disaster Governments are deluding themselves into believing investment justifies allowing AI to upend society

The AI industry wants us to believe AI superintelligence is the real threat from generative AI.

But that narrative was crafted to distract from the many ways genAI is being used to tear our societies apart, as we saw this week when a deepfake video rocked the Irish election. It must be reined in.

This from San Francisco in 2019 popped up. Evergreen graffiti.

I don’t know if there’s a more perfect illustration of the utter fucking nonsense that creative pollution by AI will produce than this choice to illustrate the power of Paramount’s new “localization” and “customization” technology by face-swapping Brad Pitt into the lead role of GET OUT

I think it's the argument that doing this (patently ridiculous thing) is better than interviewing actual people because its less ethically risky that really makes me want to do a scream. As if the risks attached to something aren't what makes it worth doing in the first place...

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Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

ICYMI: Ryan Bishop, 'The Eames Office, the Cold War and the Avant-Garde: Making the Lab of Tomorrow' - a collaborative, affair linking Hollywood, the State Department, universities, the corporate sector and international fairs during the Cold War. (Open Access) journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Neferti Tadiar's Remaindered Life: disaster capitalism constitutes disposable lives as a ‘pipeline’ of ‘aggregate material’ for ‘productive
consumption,’ by accumulative processes embedded in ‘border patrol, refugee processing and
detention, and other industries of life expenditure.’

I just can't fathom, other than admittedly stressed university balance sheets, why anyone would think it would be a good idea to replace

r e l i a b l e experts

with an

u n r e l i a b l e technology

T&C's lol

Behold the power of AI (subject to hallucinations, will likely tell you what you want to hear, S&C's apply)

The goal was wide open I'm afraid, could not resist the tap in

I think I'd prefer Sabrina carpenter too, Lizzie!

Lol GenAI remains a technology in search of a use case. Sounds like a really convoluted version of... Making a video of yourself?

The Dangers of using AI to Grade Nobody Learns, Nobody Gains

I strongly urge everyone to not just read this warning from @marcwatkins.bsky.social, but heed it, and be vocal and forceful pushing back against using AI to grade student writing. This must be anathema if we're going to have a world where learning means something. substack.com/inbox/post/1...

I dunno man, I think they are both problems maybe?