Ismael Velasco

Sycophantic AI agrees 50% more than humans even with harmful conversations: arxiv.org/abs/2510.01395

NYC Takes on Big Tech in Youth Mental Health Fight New York City has filed a sweeping lawsuit against some of the world's biggest social media companies, accusing them of driving a youth mental health crisis that has strained schools and public hospitals, The Hill reported.

NYC Takes on Big Tech in Youth Mental Health Fight

Without embracing Weber, purely observationally from fairly immersive travel, I also notice the valorisation of clock time and regimentation is higher in protestant than Catholic cultures as a whole. 9-5 exists in Switzerland and Spain, but it is weighted very differently. Certainly a nuanced theme!

There is a huge difference I think in a 9-5 dictated by an individual or organisation, and one predicted by the seasons, the markets, the children, the organic necessities of life. In UK for instance, waking up at 11am is intrinsically if vaguely immoral, a bit shameful. In Greenland it's fine.

When I think about it it's not primarily about the keeping of time but an orientation and valoration of time. Maaaai women in particular had quite a regimented day, and clock time was occasionally used and certainly compatible. But it was event oriented rather than command oriented, more elastic.

Makes sense, I appreciate the reply. Anecdotally I find even now the rhythms and ethics of time are less regimented and more organic the further from industrialised society. I found that in my time among indigenous communities, and Global South, consistently in 4 continents and a dozen countries.

AI for scientific discovery is a social problem, and just adding more compute per Sam Altman may not actually cure cancer.

arxiv.org/html/2509.06...

OpenAI says just 1.9% of conversations on ChatGPT are about relationships: That’s not the whole story, experts say A September 2025 report by ChatGPT parent company OpenAI examines how people use the chatbot. The study looked at messages from about 1.1 million conversations.

www.cnbc.com/2025/10/06/o...

$380 million - the amount the Senate wants to allocate just for AI and automation for the department of defense

Do you think they'll earn that back, or is that just a sunk cost for us to pay the government to track our data?

Exclusive: AI could erase 100 million U.S. jobs, Senate Dem report finds A ChatGPT-based analysis from Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee found that AI could wipe out swaths of both white- and blue-collar jobs

AI and automation could eliminate nearly 100 million jobs in the U.S. in the next decade, a report set to be released by the Senate on Monday finds. #climatechange #climatecrisis #globalwarming

www.axios.com/2025/10/06/a...

I also think education will be the frontier where this happens first, and that in the (quite) long term we will develop similar post-pathologising approaches to diversity in cognitive, emotional and life presentations and experiences, and a lot of suffering will vanish + a lot of capacity released.

This is great. For about 20y I've been predicting that we'll first multiply diagnostic categories and diagnosed people, until teachers would be confronted with vast enough and frequent enough diversity of challenges, that we would arrive at universal design and diagnoses would become less relevant.

I'm with @ethanlandes.bsky.social's read. Capitalism existed before but academic publishing was not remotely as monetisable as now. Perverse incentives of publish or perish were lower and narrower. We didn't have industrial scale citation farms, or a comparable pay-to-publish addressable market.

I enjoyed this nuanced, humble and thought provoking paper on what I would call (surely not the first) AI displacement anxiety. This focuses on philosophy, but broadens the frame toward the end. I think I might start a list on displacement anxiety, pieces like this feel like canaries in the mine

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Here are some examples:
github.com/Leo-nova/Pro...

www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfrien...

They are quite naive, and would be more effective with a code scaffold and RAG-style enhancements, but it would take maybe 50-100 times the work to get similar but much less adaptive results via Chatscript.

I should add that for more sophisticated personas with memories+, there are entire and rather odd communities dedicated to creating them with LLMs, convincingly enough to consider them boyfriends or girlfriends and in more extreme cases marry them. They exchange tips and tricks on this in reddit+.

Yes. It might take a few tries to hone, but: "reply as X, with such and such attitudes, age, etc" would get you pretty fa. Almost certainly further than trying to replicate such a personality by fun but extremely laborious and difficult rule and conversation crafting with Chatscript.

I worked with Chatscript in depth from 2018, briefly collaborating with Bruce Wilcox, who created Chatscript for the Loebner winning bots. Then ML conversational agents were too crude compared to Chatscript ones. Today it would take minimal prompting for an AI chatbot to outperform any Loebner bot.

LLMs Are Short-Circuiting. Is It Time To Redefine Intelligence? The AI community is going through a reckoning. LLMs are failing. They are proving they may not be the pathway towards the promised intelligence we've all been led to believe. Now what?

The headline is click-bait, but the second half of the article summarises well some core debates on intelligence in relation to, and contrast with, LLMs. Several useful concepts and voices to explore further.

www.forbes.com/sites/hessie...

It's on its way and over 100 people are already booked on. Are you? More here: dgcommunity.tsdg.org.uk

A poster of a manifesto about reading, by Loki, with 6 points on reading "bad" books, short books, comics, audioooks, webcomics and fanfic, plus not finishing bad books cos life is too short.

This is my Lokifesto #KidsConf #UKkidlit #edusky lokibooks.com/lokifesto/

Really enjoyed it! Was curious what you think survives from De Vries and Thompson's narratives in your analysis? Having convincingly shown the continuities, do you still see significant discontinuities in the post-factory era? Brilliant, innovative work, thank you.

An excellent, innovative, revisionist study highlighting continuities in work patterns pre/post factory era. Challenges received wisdom while visibilising the labour of women. I wish it explored discontinuities with industrial/industrious revolution that remain: what survives from de Vries/Thompson?

This is a very important point on the impact of adopting the language of the labs when describing the risks and problematic impacts of AI.
www.linkedin.com/posts/ismael...

I see sooo many risks in this approach. It amounts to a behaviour change intervention on a massive scale for profit goals, a leap in the commodification of our subjectivity from the social media era, a more intrusive and impactful privacy and security risk, and many more "perverse effects".

I applaud the plurality of approaches that exist, and believe it is inevitable. Science will be essential, but not sufficient IMO to achieve even partial consensus on machine consciousness, and will influence but not determine the societal and policy determinations of machine consciousness.

Even in scientific views some reject computation as an adequate representation, and others might agree consciousness is partially but not wholly computable. Mapping or disproving non or partially computable concepts of consciousness to computational structures or behaviours is an impasse.

You can mathematically demonstrate X concept of consciousness, but not empirically prove or persuade that construct X is the best representation of actual human consciousness. Vast populations link consciousness to transcendent concepts of soul, or non computable qualities like love.

I'm just not sure scientists can determine machine consciousness either with a united voice, or in a societally determinative way, bc consciousness will remain as much a cultural as a cognitive construct.