Excellent ✅⚖️ #cfpb
For $2 billion, you can have 1 day of war ... or you can upgrade a commuter rail system. I know what I'd choose. grist.org/transportati...
New commentary in @nature.com from professor Arvind Narayanan (@randomwalker.bsky.social) & PhD candidate Sayash Kapoor (@sayash.bsky.social) about the risks of rapid adoption of AI in science - read: "Why an overreliance on AI-driven modelling is bad for science" 🔗
#CITP #AI #science #AcademiaSky
Bentham’s “pushpin is as good as poetry,” but now in LARB.
lareviewofbooks.org/article/nove...
"AI targeting machines like Maven can generate industrial-scale target banks without a theory of victory"
chinatalk.media/p/iran-war-with-shashank
“As Silicon Valley continues to pour unfathomable sums into data centers, there’s a risk they will overbuild. Unlike railroad tracks and fiber-optic cables, which can last for decades, computer chips, which power data centers, quickly become obsolete.”
www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
“The rounds we’re firing — Patriot rounds, Thaad rounds . . . each round is millions of dollars. Meanwhile, the Iranians are firing…Shaheds that US intelligence officials say Iran is able to produce quickly for $30,000 a piece.
The math on this doesn’t work.”
www.ft.com/content/1471...
“Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies.”
www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...
“It’s like an iceberg hitting a ship that is already capsizing”
www.ft.com/content/cb21...
Revenue-maxxing: “Imagine a podcast creator who hosts a ticketed show, live-streams the event, captures the programming as a video and audio podcast, shares photos of the event on social, transcribes the text into a newsletter, and posts it online.”
www.adweek.com/media/live-s...
$11.3 billion could cover any of the following for a full year:
-1.4 million people on Medicaid
-19 million kids getting free school lunches
-1.4 million people getting affordable housing
-1.1 million hungry seniors fed
-0.8 million children given free child care
"Artificial intelligence represents a fundamental epistemic shift: from variables to patterns, from rules to associations, from surveys to sensors. This transition may transform... the very meanings of concepts such as citizenship, democracy, and population." journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
“For decades, corporate America has viewed labor as a cost to be minimized as opposed to a resource to be developed.”
www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
I'm suing Grammarly over its paid AI feature that presented editing suggestions as if they came from me - and many other writers and journalists - without consent.
State law requires consent before someone's name can be used for commercial purposes.
www.wired.com/story/gramma...
🥁🥁🥁 Newly out from us today in Science Advances: “Biased AI Writing Assistants Shift Users’ Attitudes on Societal Issues”.
Large Language Models are providing users with autocomplete writing suggestions on many platforms. Could these suggestions shift users’ own attitudes? (spoiler: YES) (1/7)
Last was a discussion on gender bias in AI systems at the LSE with @drpragyaagarwal.bsky.social, Karen Blake, Carrie Friese, and @lizstokoe.bsky.social (👋) www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Aoa... (8/8)
Since the CFPB has been stripped of its power, Credit Bureaus aren't correcting mistakes on consumers' credit reports.
www.propublica.org/article/cred...
The threats “were particularly galling for mid-career professionals who felt their 20-year-old bosses barely understood the fields they were trying to automate.”
nymag.com/intelligence...
“Time that the software deems “unproductive” could be deducted from his pay, and if a few minutes passed without him typing, the system pinged him to ask whether he had been working.”
nymag.com/intelligence...
LLMs “seem to be systems that take the prompt, abstract it into longer and longer texts, connecting to wider clusters of text, and then restructuring all of that text into condensed variations structured like a response.”
mail.cyberneticforests.com/modeling-lan...
“AI thought leaders are looking at the early success of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, extrapolating wildly, and concluding that AI software is going to transform the economy and put tons of people out of work.”
www.understandingai.org/p/software-d...
“Private funds layer on high (and opaque) fees that eat into gains. And no one has explained how 401(k) investors would get in and out of illiquid investments that rarely face objective valuations.”
www.ft.com/content/3dda...
“The Dutch supermarket chain Jumbo introduced a slower so-called chat checkout to let customers take their time and talk with cashiers. It proved so popular the company decided to expand it to around 200 stores, especially in places where loneliness was a big problem.”
www.ft.com/content/bc23...
As someone who watched the careful stewardship of grants over many years, the lack of care and the dismissal of the hard work of scholars and NEH program staff described here is devastating and shameful.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...
The crypto ads are so nefarious because they *never mention* crypto.
In an IL House race, for example, they accuse the anti-crypto candidate of being too favorable to corporate special interests.
Extremely cynical stuff.
“Civilizational signifiers function in reactionary discourse less as markers of genuine cultural distinctiveness than as flexible transnational codes, enabling unexpected alignments across geopolitical boundaries”
www.sinicapodcast.com/p/the-civili...
“Decentralization at a technical level breeds centralization at an industrial level.”
lareviewofbooks.org/article/tim-...
New post: Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? (No. No it can't. Come on, now.)
davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...
This is from June of last year and the answer is yes; Google has destroyed its own function.
