Guy Wilson

I realized last week that I have been too focused on AI by itself and that the ways it is delivered (laptop, phone, smartwatch, smart speaker, smart glasses, drone, android, or implant) is just as important in understanding the intent of the company and the effects on the individual and society.

War on Cognition Technology and the century-long assault on our humanity

The 20th century saw the flowering of techniques and the beginning of electronic & chemical means to attack the human mind. That was its great contribution to human history.
guywilson.substack.com/p/war-on-cog...

currently the winning thumbnail 🐀

forget the lies you have been told! rats are empathetic, intelligent, and sweet pocket puppies.

and their tails are beautiful.

Mapping out France's 'Great Fear of 1789' shows how misinformation spreads like a virus Since the rise of the internet and social media, society has become well-acquainted with the idea of "virality" as the rapid spread of ideas and information (or misinformation). The relatively recent ...

A study in viral disinformation phys.org/news/2025-08...

Monstrous Modernity Why doesn't anyone want to upload their unconscious?

Modernity is a monster. Not Frankenstein's Monster, so beloved of modernist and post-modernist scholars.

Guy Wilson on Substack Past, present, and future are complex, with material and non-material components. They may have causal and acausal relationships. The present has the property of mediating past and future. This is no...

substack.com/@guywilson/n...

Disparate Thoughts Ideas from my working notebooks.

Disparate Thoughts
open.substack.com/pub/guywilso...

I don't think we hear as much about data center pollution as a threat to local health as much as we do about energy and water use, or even about long-term effect on climate.

The Need to Understand Or why we need to think about AI in the context of civilization as a whole

The Need to Understand
This is a short post, the result of pondering some recent conversations
open.substack.com/pub/guywilso...

Doctored Doom Back in 2012 ("the year of the MOOC"), when Sebastian Thrun told Wired that, in fifty years time there would only be ten universities left in the world and his startup Udacity had a chance to be one o...

I think this is one of Audrey Watters' best pieces.

2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/drdoom/

Beyond Memorial Day I think we need another day

This is about Memorial Day holiday, who it honors, and about the need for something more.
open.substack.com/pub/guywilso...

Black Mirror was a warmup act Breaking, worrisome news

open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...

AI literacy, hallucinations, and the law: A case study In the battle for AI literacy—and communicating clearly the weaknesses of AI— hypesters are winning.

66 cases of lawyers caught using AI-hallucinated legal citations in US courts this year, and as Marcus says, these are only the ones we know about. Hallucinations are not going away anytime I've soon, certainly not with the technologies we have now.
open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...

The paper, “Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI” raises questions about how people who use AI at work are perceived and anticipate they will be perceived. The results are provisional but point to users being stigmatized as lazy. 

www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Sign the Petition Prevent the federal government from prohibiting state regulation of AI

There are not many signatures yet, but this is a petition objecting to the addition of a ban on state-level AI regulation (drafted in the broadest manner possible, to include the regulation of AI use in decision-making systems). Please consider signing. www.change.org/p/prevent-th...

AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state Big Tech wants you to share your private thoughts with chatbots — while backing a government with contempt for privacy.

I’ve recently seen suggestions that educational institutions should use AI therapists to help with the student mental health crisis. There are lots of reasons why they shouldn’t do that. Here is one.

www.theverge.com/policy/66568...

Republicans Try to Cram Ban on AI Regulation Into Budget Reconciliation Bill Republicans try to use the Budget Reconciliation bill to stop states from regulating AI entirely for 10 years.

www.404media.co/republicans-...

AI Slop Education There's a tendency to write about technological change as an "all of a sudden" occurrence – even if you try to offer some background, some precursors, some concurrent events, or a longer, broader pers...

This is the best response I’ve seen on New York Magazine’s big article on AI cheating.

2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/ai-slop-educ...

Of Canaries & Tsunamis One of the big scare stories today is the one from New York Magazine about AI cheating.

open.substack.com/pub/guywilso...

To believe that any particular path in humanity’s future is either inevitable or immutable is a sign of ignorance, indolence, or insanity. That says a great deal about a lot of ostensibly smart people.

Old Conversations Notes on a friendship and the changing face of technology

I lost one of the best people I know this past week. That prompted some thoughts on a friendship, and remembering old conversations about how we used to think about technology. guywilson.substack.com/p/old-conver...

AI cannot be separated from the political agendas to which it is harnessed, from its military origins and lethal uses, the greed of CEOs, or its environmental consequences. Every "ethical" use of it must be balanced against these.

I often see pieces by computer scientists and engineers claiming only they can accurately critique AI or other tech. A few know tech is inseparable from culture, how people use it, & how it uses them. Those I'm willing to listen to. The rest live in fantasy worlds as far as I'm concerned.

The Guernica of AI A warning from a former Palantir employee in a new American crisis

An excellent piece I wish I had read back in February! I've hinted at this blog posts, but this lays it all out explicitly. The military AI kill chain is turning into the model for government and business, only the last steps might be an arrest or a sale.

open.substack.com/pub/ziggurat...

Fellow authors, I love you, and I know it feels like we don’t have a choice, but B&N and Am*zon both scheduled sales this week to preempt Independent Bookstore Day, a hugely vital source of income for indie bookstores. Please don’t promote their sales; please promote your local indie this week.

“The bargain we are being asked to ratify” – AI as technological bribery “The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe.”- Lewis Mumford (1964)   Something has changed. At least in the way that AI is publicly discussed. Where for a …

I've been neglecting this blog for a while - I used to read it regularly. Clearly, that was a mistake. This is long and philosophical but also a good refutation of the common arguments for not regulating and for supporting AI these days.

librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2025/03/02/t...

Powerful

Clearing Things Up or trying to be less obscure

I’ve been struggling to express myself lately, just trying to get my thoughts on paper and then online. This is my attempt to be less obscure and more organized. Hopefully, it will make sense and lead to more organized, more readable posts.
open.substack.com/pub/guywilso...

How indeed? Read this post all the way through!

future historians debating whether dow jones, nasdaq, and S&P 500 were three separate gods of ancient America, or just three aspects of the same god