Stephen Hughes

AI models may be developing their own ‘survival drive’, researchers say Like 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000, some AIs seem to resist being turned off and will even sabotage shutdown

This Guardian article genuinely starts with "Like 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000..." before introducing the idea that AIs have "drives". Maybe I should get ahead of things and announce that they also have a death drive so we're double fricked.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

What if the UK would take its one pro-social trait (generously giving up seats on the tube) and think hard about how it could use that as a starting point for rebuilding its crumbling society.

The immediate Western injunctions on Gaza to "heal"

Obsessed with this painting of a vision of Joan of Arc by Louis Maurice Boutet de Monvel, a children's book illustrator. Nice high res version available at www.nga.gov/artworks/195...

Love the wild text formatting in this book.

At the amazing Haptic Trouble conference at Sorbonne Nouvelle. Presenting a paper today - Lonely Dreams of Touch Without a Body - where I discuss fantasies about touchless tech via Derrida and Klein. But the main news is that Paris knows how to cater for academics. See pic for hard evidence.

Conclusion: OK so not all the chapters are completely finished.

8. Power and Legitimacy: How can we communicate science and technology meaningfully when so much of it is beyond words? Here I make the case for a form of emotionally mature science communication that brings in all the good stuff like love, care, and repair.

7. Meaningful Participation or Meaningless Bullshit?: Participatory forms of engagement like co-production and citizen science can infantilise the communities that they wish to empower. Understanding the underlying emotional conflicts faced by public engagement professionals can help address this.

6. Hype and Techno-Optimism: The desires and fantasies of tech bros get scaled and embedded in technologies, influencing everyone else’s capacity to dream. If we want to drag technology back down to reality, and have mature conversations about it, we need to confront uncertainty and ambiguity.

5. Can We Engage with Conspiracy Theorists?: Maaaaaaaaaybe. But you need to understand the underlying affective dynamics that psychoanalytic researchers have kindly outlined for us. Conspiracy theorists’ feelings of anxiety & alienation are familiar – they just build a bad social critique from them.

4. Vaccine Hesitancy: Who Should the Public Trust?: How can we overcome vaccine hesitancy? Approaching emotions like trust as social practices that are configured morally and discursively and within specific historical and institutional contexts is a good start, I say in this chapter.

3. Is it OK for Scientists to Cry?: Scientists are made up of human beings. They have bodies and these bodies sometimes get stressed out. Especially when they try to communicate about climate change. Or exist in the US. Affective insights can help us understand how to communicate in these contexts.

2. Affect and Emotion in Science Communication: No one seems to know what an emotion is so I’m going to try and cobble together an interdisciplinary perspective that draws from affective neuroscience, affect theory, sociology of emotions, and psychoanalysis. It’s very cobbly.

1. Intro: Sci comm faces numerous challenges – conspiracy theories and misinformation, public mistrust in knowledge institutions, technological hype, and a rise in right-wing anti-intellectualism. Thinking about the emotions involved in these relationships can help us to understand what is going on.

Drafts of all chapters for Affect, Emotion and Feeling in Science Communication are now complete. They still need quite a bit of work but here’s an overview of where things currently stand (a thread):

Same girl lol

I think we need to go back to the early 2010s and consider what the vibrating matter makes of all this.

Everything about this headline is so potently cringey. Like a frickin Brass Eye sketch.

Great paper by @felicitycallard.bsky.social ‬& Stan Papoulias which reasserts that the value of psychoanalysis is its confrontation of our capacity for creativity AND destruction and the inescapable role that fantasy plays in navigating that conflict - mh-bmj-com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/content/45/2...

I just donated, and encourage you to do so too.

A version of the Drake hotline bling meme. Top text is: "laws restricting people's internet use." Bottom text is "Laws restricting only British people's internet use."

The number of air and water monitoring bots relentlessly screaming their data out into the Twitter void tells us a lot about contemporary visions of science communication

Opinion | I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.

My NYT op-ed this morning
I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/o...

STS Newsletter Our Newsletter is meant to keep our friends, colleagues, and all in the STS community abreast of everything exciting happening in the Department

Our department newsletter now has two editions, thanks to the brilliant @stephenhues.bsky.social. Which makes it A Going Concern. Have a look at what we've been up to www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/sts-news...

Without access to playful creativity in our reflection, discourses of responsibility / ethics can easily descend into organised nonsense and chaos [quote here from Winnicott].

It's weird that the Giddens-Beck-Wynne axis of STS's sociology (e.g., reflexivity, minimal role of the subject) has recieved such little direct theoretical critique within the discipline.

Synthetic Human Genome Project gets go ahead Scientists start a controversial project to create the building blocks of human life, in what is thought to be a world first.

"The sky is the limit" - reassuring guardrails in place 👍🏻

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Thanks Jamie!

Promoted to Associate Professor! Pleased x 1000 🥳🥳🥳