Frank Pasquale

The Civilization Trap On the Inevitable Return of a Surprisingly Recent Idea

“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...

Can the Internet Be Saved? | Los Angeles Review of Books After troubleshooting Tim Berners-Lee’s memoir, it becomes clear that the internet’s flaws were there from the start.

“Decentralization at a technical level breeds centralization at an industrial level.”
lareviewofbooks.org/article/tim-...

Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? No. No it can't. Come on, now.

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.

this is a must read 🔥🔥

Reading (and Shopping) with Angela McRobbie | Los Angeles Review of Books A reflection on the Birmingham School cultural studies scholar’s vision of girlhood.

“As a discipline, cultural studies occupied a liminal space between sociology and English literature and was defined by research subjects ‘not considered legitimate’ enough for either, as McRobbie puts it.”
lareviewofbooks.org/article/ange...

Brown University researchers launch AI legislation tracking and analysis portal As a tool for researchers, lawmakers, journalists and the public, the CNTR AISLE Portal provides analysis of state- and federal-level AI bills pending across the U.S.

Great resource for anyone engaged or interested in US AI policy and governance from @geomblog.bsky.social and his team www.brown.edu/news/2026-03...

Is Google about to destroy the web? Google says adding more AI to its search engine will rejuvenate the internet. Others predict an apocalypse for websites. One thing is clear: this era of online history is closing.

Welcome to the "machine web,” where “websites are built for AI to read rather than for humans, and reading summaries by chatbots becomes a primary way we consume information.”
www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Exclusive: Researchers trick a bot that prescribes meds The state of Utah is running a pilot with Doctronic's AI system to refill some prescriptions.

“Researchers were able to make the bot spread vaccine conspiracy theories, triple a patient's prescribed pain medication dosage, and recommend methamphetamine as treatment.”
www.axios.com/2026/03/04/d...

New Cambridge Element, Legislating Peace, by Elizabeth L. Brannon and Jakana Thomas, out now! Read for free for the next 2 weeks at
https://cup.org/4aJv0Oe

Words Without Consequence What does it mean to have speech without a speaker?

“Dignity depends on whether words carry real stakes. When language is mediated by LLMs, several ordinary conditions for dignity begin to fail. Dignity depends, first, on speaking in one's own voice—not merely being heard, but recognizing oneself in what one says.”
www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Words Without Consequence What does it mean to have speech without a speaker?

"When fluent speech without responsibility becomes normal...it changes what it means to be human," Deb Roy writes, weighing how AI might be training us to “accept words without ownership and meaning without accountability.” www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

AI vs. the Pentagon the real alignment problem is Pete Hegseth

“When Anthropic said no, he threatened to designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk”: a highest-tier national security designation usually reserved for companies like Huawei run by foreign adversaries. (Even Tencent and DeepSeek are not tarred with this label.”
jasmi.news/p/ai-pentagon

They Wanted a University Without Cancel Culture. Then Dissenters Were Ousted. Inside the civil war at the anti-woke university backed by Bari Weiss.

Hmm, maybe it wasn’t about free speech after all?
www.politico.com/news/magazin...

“My ‘methodology’ was a series of errors”: Gemini generates false records and fake screenshots of TNA website | Who Do You Think You Are Magazine The Gemini LLM generates fake records and screenshots from the UK National Archives, a family historian has revealed

Gemini: 'I deeply regret the time and effort you spent searching for references that I fabricated. My ‘methodology’ was a series of errors and an attempt to cover those errors with more artificial information.'

www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/news/gemini-...

84% of the time, “ChatGPT Health” killed a customer using their paid service as advertised

Thank you, Brett!

The irony is stark: a private AI company is holding the line on guardrails against mass surveillance and autonomous weapons—while the federal government pushes to remove them. After revoking Biden's AI safety policies, the Trump administration is now pressuring Anthropic to abandon its own.

Thank you!! Much appreciated!

It's a bit perplexing to read a paper saying the black box metaphor "precludes meaningful regulation" when I wrote a book with almost 50 pages of policy recommendations based on it.
Anyway, here's the paper: philarchive.org/archive/NOVT...
and here's the book: www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt...

Can humanity be robotized? - Jacques Attali On the threshold of great mutations, there are always prophets of collapse. They announce the end of work, the end of history, the end of ideologies, the end of growth, the end of man. Today, more pro...

“Today, we’re witnessing the accelerating demise of repetitive, measurable, standardizable work – work that can be codified and optimized.”
www.attali.com/en/positive-...

Agentic AI Can Complete Whole Courses. Now What? A young tech entrepreneur launched the tool Einstein this week, marketing it as a way to free students from busywork—and triggering robust faculty debate. Einstein’s creator says that was the whole po...

“Mills sent an open letter to OpenAI, Perplexity, Google and Anthropic, asking the companies to program their existing and future agentic browsers to refuse to complete assignments in learning management systems”
www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Power failure could undermine America’s AI ambitions Spiralling electricity demand threatens to hold the US back in its technological race with China

“Since many data centres use diesel generators as a backup, price increases of 20 to 50% could be expected in the tight global diesel market.”
www.ft.com/content/47da...

How China’s universities joined the global elite Investment by Beijing has transformed the country’s institutions despite lingering questions about research quality and intellectual freedom

“The damage being done to the research enterprise across our top US universities stands in marked contrast to the systematic efforts in China to support major scientific initiatives”
www.ft.com/content/845e...

Trump, seeking executive power over elections, is urged to declare emergency Activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a draft executive order that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.

JFC

This is legal gibberish. There is no emergency national security power that “unlocks” presidential control.

If you want to invent magical legalism, you should just write “if the President says abracadabra he can dissolve Congress.” That makes as much sense as this does.

Britain’s building standards are now so bad, even the super-rich are facing housing misery | Phineas Harper Residents of the UK’s most expensive flats have won a court case over defective pipework. If their homes are shoddily built, what hope do the rest of us have, asks writer and curator Phineas Harper

“At every tier of society, the UK seems hamstrung by abysmal construction standards, unable to build anything without catastrophic bodges and eye-watering remediation bills. How did building in Britain get so bad?”
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Michael Pollan Punctures the AI Bubble His new book, about the mystery of consciousness, strengthens the case that technology will never truly replicate humans.

“It is one of the paradoxes of computer science that the ‘higher’ capabilities …—reason, language, intelligence—have proved easier for machines to master than the more elemental capabilities we share with animals, including feelings and emotions”
www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/0...

How Have Platforms Addressed Addictive Design Under DSA Addictive design remains substantively under-addressed in VLOPs’ systemic risk assessments under the Digital Services Act, writes Cecilia Isola.

he European Commission’s latest DSA proceedings put addictive design squarely in the regulatory spotlight. Cecilia Isola examines how Very Large Online Platforms are handling, or sidestepping, this risk in their mandatory DSA assessments.

This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media's coverage of how people are using Meta's Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent. “I consider it to ...

NEW: A hobbyist has created Nearby Glasses, an app that warns you if someone close by is wearing smart glasses. 404 Media spoke to the creator who said he was inspired by our coverage that uncovers how men are wearing Meta's Ray-Bans to covertly film massage parlor workers.

Behind the Curtain: AI's biggest threats Almost everywhere else, the vast majority are indifferent, pessimistic — even downright dystopian.

“The AI companies are pouring money into politics, but it's mostly to thwart regulation”
www.axios.com/2026/02/24/a...