David Berreby

The AI Revolution Asks Us: What Kind of People Do We Want to Be? Deciding You Can Skip This Question Is Tempting, But It’s a Dead End

In the face of #AI onslaughts, the editors of @nplusonemag.com say "it's OK to be a Luddite." Here's why I think that is wrong.

Why Build AI? Maybe Because It's Fun for the Builders The underrated allure of exercising one's talent to do cool things

Why do people work on AI when they think it could harm us long-term? Let’s not underestimate the appeal of creating beautiful things for their own sake. Also: AI used to recreating a murder victim to testify in court, the impact of AI college-cheating. In the latest Robots for the Rest of Us post.

Could #AI interpreters let us talk (and listen) to animals? More importantly, would we like what we hear? Also this week: Why economists think robots cause crime. robots4therestofus.substack.com/p/talking-to...

Good idea.

The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces As Americans increasingly get their news from online shows and streamers, the influence of this media ecosystem becomes more prominent — and Media Matters has found that the most popular of this conte...

NEW: As Americans increasingly get their news from online shows and streamers, our analysis found that this expanding media ecosystem is overwhelmingly right-leaning.

A cowardly publisher is a sad sight -- even when I agree with the views of those who intimidated that publisher.

More & more I find myself treating LLMs as commodities. Some Perplexity for this, a bit of Claude for that, Grok now, NotebookLM later. With so many flooding the zone I don't feel loyal to one over another. Am I unusual?

Authoritative perspective on all the recent "robots are ready" hype.

Is there any reason for Senate Dems to vote for keeping the gov't open? Shouldn't they hold out for some concessions, like restored NIH and USAID funding? Not seeing how a shutdown is worse than letting Trump's rampage continue

Amazed people who are cheering b/c they hate today's victim of the gov't ignoring its own laws. Do people really think it could never happen to them?

That's a fair assessment, I agree

I am with you on "CU has failed its duties" but "CU had it coming" comes too close to justifying a gov't whose acts are far worse than circulating vile leaflets on a campus. My 2 thoughts are 1 CU must repair its breach AND 2 no one should find Fed action is reasonable

I fail to see the justice in, say, scotching the plans of a postdoc to study cancer at CU because some admins failed in their duties. I don't see how any misconduct or incompetence at CU justifies the disappearing of a green card holder by ICE.

I don't defend CU or thug protests. As you've said, we should be capable if holding 2 ideas at once about all this. CU should act. But this gov't cure is worse than the disease.

Surely they're at risk because the Trump administration seized on a pretext for its planned attacks on academia. Why blame kids for decisions of the regime?

At the Women's March in Manhattan today, police presence was pretty unobtrusive and chill. Except for the 8 or 9 cops standing close around a parked Tesla truck. Ready to spring to its defense, I guess.

After Elon Musk Fired Her, She Kept Showing Up to Work—for Free The billionaire and his followers are out to cull federal employees they think are lazy and overpaid. But without people like Bianca Sicich, the Attwater’s prairie chicken could go extinct.

Yet another dedicated scientist and public servant, this time from US Fish and Wildlife, showing up unpaid after she was fired to volunteer to protect an endangered species.

What are we even doing here.

🎁 link: 🧪

Every Robot Has a Plan, Until It Gets Punched in the Face Inevitably, now and then, a robot will smack a human (due to error). And a human will smack a robot (due to human nature)

As robots appear more frequently in ordinary lives, there are going to be times when people bash the machines. And times when robots bash people. Here’s what I think such incidents tell us about human-robot relations. (Spoiler: Nothing to do with uprisings and dystopias.)

What the hell? Why?

Aquarium at Coney Island? Our family loves that place! Or, really, any place that looks like that.

What could possibly go wrong?

Sometimes AI Mediocrity Is Just What You Want If your strategy at work is to spare yourself for other purposes, AI can help

There are times in life when you don't want to give 100 % at work. When you just want to be adequate and leave on time. And maybe even make a little trouble. If this is you, don't fear #AI. It can be a great accomplice in your quest for non-excellence.

Never too early to start making summer plans.

How to Manage AI Therapists, Robot Friends, AI Ghosts Anat Perry on how to decide where an AI or robot can help humans with emotional labor -- and where the machines can't.

Had a great talk with @anatperry.bsky.social about when/why people want human effort, not just a product, in their relationships. Important for deciding how and when to regulate AI therapists, AI friendship, AI romance, AI "ghosts" (recreations of deceased loved ones).

An "#AI in 2025" moment: My pdf app has a #LLM "copilot" that can summarize a document and suggest questions about it. But it can't tell me how many words are in it.

A hallmark of a state that is coming apart is when regular people have to think about the government all the time.

Also, to be specific here (because it does matter) DeepSeek is *not* open source — it’s open _weights_ with the difference being that you can run it on your own machine with the code, but you don’t know what material exactly it was trained on. An important distinction, worth emphasizing.

Good to know!

Since it is open source, though, can this sort of thing be corrected by users? I assume yes but would love to know what tech-adept folks think.